Wind Farm Noise and Shadow Flicker Becoming an Issue

April 7th, 2010

Can the noise from a 400-foot wind turbine disrupt your life if it's over a football field away? How about from two football fields away? If the noise isn't a problem, can the flicker of the shadow created by the moving blades on wind turbines disrupt lives?

Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute says that new wind farms are running into community opposition over the anticipated problems of noise and shadow flicker.

A number of studies on the issue have been inconclusive, scientifically speaking. While they find health problems in the area around wind farms, those health problems don't occur in numbers that are "statistically significant." Of course, statistical significance may not matter much. I recently watched a community battle over whether there would be a wind farm overlooking Bluefield, Virginia. Mix the health concerns in with a little environmentalism and concerns about whether property values will go down – and suddenly you have a lot of community opposition…


This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Wind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Wind Farm Noise and Shadow Flicker Becoming an Issue”

  1. Robert Says:

    Interessting question. But I can image that the life of the people living in the house of that example video is disturbed.

Leave a Reply