Do stress and lack of sleep contribute to the development of cancer, as with other diseases? Yes.
Does wind turbine noise raise stress levels and disrupt sleep? Yes.
The World Health Organization has recognized the importance to health of uninterrupted sleep and has recommended outdoor noise limits for wind turbines: <https://wind-watch.org/doc/?p=5227>
It’s very difficult to be definite about any environmentally caused illness, because so many variables are involved. But reports have been consistent since around 2000, when the size of wind turbines increased dramatically, of many people suffering a similar set of symptoms after nearby wind turbines start operating. When they leave the area, they experience relief from the overt symptoms (eg, headache, dizziness, feeling of pressure, stress, depression, irritability). The cause is thus quite obvious.
Pets and other animals are similarly affected.
Dr. Nina Pierpont coined the term “Wind Turbine Syndrome” for those symptoms, which also include sleep disturbance and deprivation, tinnitus (ringing in ears), ear pressure, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia (fast heart rate), irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and panic episodes associated with sensations of movement or quivering inside the body. She attributed these effects to inner ear disturbances caused by infrasound and low-frequency noise (ILFN), akin to motion sickness.
As with motion sickness, people have different sensitivities, which also complicates the epidemiology.
Interested acoustical engineers then began measuring ILFN near large wind turbines and did indeed find that pulsing ILFN is a characteristic component of their noise.
In fact, the phenomenon had been documented in the early 1980s by NASA scientists investigating complaints by neighbors of an experimental large wind turbine (which size was not available commercially until around 2000).
See: “Health Effects of Noise from Large Wind Turbines”
In December 2011, Denmark added a 20-dBA limit on low-frequency noise (10–160 Hz) inside homes.
In Portugal, researchers led by Mariana Alves-Pereira have studied longer-term physical changes in the lungs, heart, and muscles caused by ILFN. They called it “vibroacoustic disease” and have documented conditions near wind turbines that are as bad as for the cases they studied of people living near heavy industrial sites.
The science is still relatively new, but the effect of noise, whether audible or infrasonic, is increasingly recognized as a valid concern in siting wind turbines near homes and places of work.
For example, in 2017 Vermont implemented a nighttime limit of 39 dBA 100 feet from any nonparticipating residence with the goal of keeping the interior sound level below 30 dBA. See also: <http://wndfo.net/ords>
[Also see: “Wind farms do make you sick” (Irish Daily Mail, 16 Oct 2015)]
Showing posts with label wind power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wind power. Show all posts
April 5, 2019
Trump said that wind turbines cause cancer!
May 1, 2018
Renewable energy undermine
Jeff Rice @EvolvingCaveman asked on Twitter: Hi @windwatchorg, Haven't you guys got anything better to do than try to undermine clean, green #RenewableEnergy? Enlighten us - what would you like to see make up our energy mix? Expensive nuclear? #ClimateChange causing #FossilFuels? @GeorgeMonbiot
National Wind Watch @windwatchorg answered:
The unfortunate fact is that renewable energy does not meaningfully replace fossil and nuclear fuels.
And such diffuse (low-density) sources as wind and solar require massive plants to capture even enough to make selling virtue-signaling green tags profitable.
That means wind and solar on an industrial scale necessarily have adverse effects of their own, particularly as they need huge tracts of previously undeveloped rural and wild land, including mountain ridge lines.
And being intermittent and, in the case of wind, highly variable, they still require backup, which is forced to run much less efficiently (ie, with more carbon emissions) than it could without having to contend with wind's erratic generation.
So for such utter lack of actual benefit coupled with substantial harm, no, we do not support wind and work to protect the environment from its depredations.
We advocate conservation, which reduces fossil and nuclear fuel use much more than wind and solar do.
Jeff Rice replied: I notice that you haven't answered my question...
National Wind Watch answered: That's a separate issue from National Wind Watch's mission to educate people about wind's shortcomings and harm. We do not take a position for any over any other except to note that wind is not a solution.
Jeff Rice: Campaign organisations have long recognised the need to promote solutions to the problems they campaign against. Your anti #WindPower campaign lacks substance and comes across as NIMBYism. It also looks like you are apologists for the #FossilFuels industry. #NIMBY
National Wind Watch:
That is of course a risk we take. On the other hand, there are plenty of groups already proposing solutions, and those who question wind power represent people of very different views, from off-grid deep green to pronuclear free marketers.
Our role is to provide a resource for all of them on the issue of industrial-scale wind power. If people see that as being apologists for fossil fuels or giving comfort to climate skeptics or NIMBYism, that is a failure of imagination on their part.
It is a failure of environmentalists, driven by the "need to promote solutions", that they have forgot their role is to challenge and question solutions, especially those promoted by government and industry and banking in collusion.
Jeff Rice: Various forms of #RenewableEnergy are the solution! Although, do you think that we don't need to tackle #ClimateChange or air pollution? And as for renewables being supported by the establishment - what utter nonsense. Governments are very much wedded to #FossilsFuels!
National Wind Watch:
Wind and solar would be great if their benefits far outweighed their harm, but, as already noted, on a large scale their harm far outweighs their benefits, because they do very little to alleviate carbon emissions, pollution or fossil fuel dependency.
As to government support for wind, it is hardly a secret that subsidies, regulatory favoritism and special market structures are necessary for wind development.
Jeff Rice: Why do you think wind and solar DON'T reduce carbon emissions? A gross inaccuracy on your part.
National Wind Watch: How much have carbon emissions decreased with the massive industrialization of rural and wild places with wind turbines around the world since the 1990s? It's madness to continue.
Jeff Rice: Why you are wrong: It's a myth that wind turbines don't reduce carbon emissions
National Wind Watch: Goodall and Lynas point to a passing reduction of electricity generation from CCGT plants, not to any actual reduction of fuel use or carbon emissions.
National Wind Watch @windwatchorg answered:
The unfortunate fact is that renewable energy does not meaningfully replace fossil and nuclear fuels.
And such diffuse (low-density) sources as wind and solar require massive plants to capture even enough to make selling virtue-signaling green tags profitable.
That means wind and solar on an industrial scale necessarily have adverse effects of their own, particularly as they need huge tracts of previously undeveloped rural and wild land, including mountain ridge lines.
And being intermittent and, in the case of wind, highly variable, they still require backup, which is forced to run much less efficiently (ie, with more carbon emissions) than it could without having to contend with wind's erratic generation.
So for such utter lack of actual benefit coupled with substantial harm, no, we do not support wind and work to protect the environment from its depredations.
We advocate conservation, which reduces fossil and nuclear fuel use much more than wind and solar do.
Jeff Rice replied: I notice that you haven't answered my question...
National Wind Watch answered: That's a separate issue from National Wind Watch's mission to educate people about wind's shortcomings and harm. We do not take a position for any over any other except to note that wind is not a solution.
Jeff Rice: Campaign organisations have long recognised the need to promote solutions to the problems they campaign against. Your anti #WindPower campaign lacks substance and comes across as NIMBYism. It also looks like you are apologists for the #FossilFuels industry. #NIMBY
National Wind Watch:
That is of course a risk we take. On the other hand, there are plenty of groups already proposing solutions, and those who question wind power represent people of very different views, from off-grid deep green to pronuclear free marketers.
Our role is to provide a resource for all of them on the issue of industrial-scale wind power. If people see that as being apologists for fossil fuels or giving comfort to climate skeptics or NIMBYism, that is a failure of imagination on their part.
It is a failure of environmentalists, driven by the "need to promote solutions", that they have forgot their role is to challenge and question solutions, especially those promoted by government and industry and banking in collusion.
Jeff Rice: Various forms of #RenewableEnergy are the solution! Although, do you think that we don't need to tackle #ClimateChange or air pollution? And as for renewables being supported by the establishment - what utter nonsense. Governments are very much wedded to #FossilsFuels!
National Wind Watch:
Wind and solar would be great if their benefits far outweighed their harm, but, as already noted, on a large scale their harm far outweighs their benefits, because they do very little to alleviate carbon emissions, pollution or fossil fuel dependency.
As to government support for wind, it is hardly a secret that subsidies, regulatory favoritism and special market structures are necessary for wind development.
Jeff Rice: Why do you think wind and solar DON'T reduce carbon emissions? A gross inaccuracy on your part.
National Wind Watch: How much have carbon emissions decreased with the massive industrialization of rural and wild places with wind turbines around the world since the 1990s? It's madness to continue.
Jeff Rice: Why you are wrong: It's a myth that wind turbines don't reduce carbon emissions
National Wind Watch: Goodall and Lynas point to a passing reduction of electricity generation from CCGT plants, not to any actual reduction of fuel use or carbon emissions.
January 18, 2018
Shortsighted and dangerous
Olaf Errwigge writes in The Commons in response to Michael Bosworth, “Which price do we pay? Keeping additional industrial-scale wind power out of our region is shortsighted and dangerous. Is there any middle ground?”:
Bosworth’s earnest appeal first requires that his premises be examined. Is wind energy actually “economically efficient” or “acutely needed”? Is the price actually just “some soil disturbance, some bird mortality”? Does it actually bring “significant benefits”?
Wind is a diffuse, intermittent, and highly variable resource, so there is no way that it can be economically efficient or have only moderate adverse impacts, because massive machines over vast (rural and wild) areas are required to collect any meaningful amount. The Windham Regional Commission Energy Plan clearly notes the unavoidable habitat destruction and fragmentation as well as many other environmental impacts:
In short, the benefits of large-scale wind power are virtually nil, and the adverse impacts are substantial. It is certainly not "shortsighted and dangerous" to recognize that reality and to discourage such a destructive and unhelpful form of energy development.
Bosworth’s earnest appeal first requires that his premises be examined. Is wind energy actually “economically efficient” or “acutely needed”? Is the price actually just “some soil disturbance, some bird mortality”? Does it actually bring “significant benefits”?
Wind is a diffuse, intermittent, and highly variable resource, so there is no way that it can be economically efficient or have only moderate adverse impacts, because massive machines over vast (rural and wild) areas are required to collect any meaningful amount. The Windham Regional Commission Energy Plan clearly notes the unavoidable habitat destruction and fragmentation as well as many other environmental impacts:
“Wind turbine placement can be difficult and controversial because of natural resource impacts, aesthetics, noise, and the need for placement at elevations of 2,500-3,300 feet, locations in Vermont that tend to be sensitive with thin soils and steep slopes. The windiest areas in the region are most often on the higher-elevation ridgelines that are sensitive habitats for plants and wildlife, and are the source of the region’s most pristine headwaters. In areas where road access does not exist, new permanent roads must be built to service the wind facility. Other potentially negative environmental impacts include bird and bat mortality, habitat disruption and fragmentation, erosion, pollution from facility maintenance, turbine noise, and visual flicker.And benefits? Its intermittency and high variability require that wind be 100% backed up by other sources. Wind serves as only a feel-good add-on to an electrical system that has to be able to work without it anyway, ready to kick in when the wind drops, and standing by to continuously balance its erratic feed. Those other sources do so at a cost to their own efficiency.
“Given the nature of utility-scale wind development, which involves considerable blasting, road building, and other permanent alterations of the landscape and surface hydrology, it is deemed to be incompatible with the two aforementioned land use designations [ie, Resource Lands and Productive Rural Lands].”
In short, the benefits of large-scale wind power are virtually nil, and the adverse impacts are substantial. It is certainly not "shortsighted and dangerous" to recognize that reality and to discourage such a destructive and unhelpful form of energy development.
May 31, 2017
Rare earths and wind turbines: Yes, it’s a problem
Despite wind industry lobbyists and apologists asserting otherwise, rare earth metals, particularly neodymium, are indeed extensively used in wind turbine magnets. (And then there’s lithium for the batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage facilities.*)
‘Permanent magnet machines feature higher efficiencies than machines with excitation windings (absence of field winding losses), less weight and the advantage of having no slip-rings and brushes. Machines above kilowatt range (and most below) employ high-specific energy density PM material, preferably of neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B).’ —Wind Energy Systems for Electric Power Generation, by Manfred Stiebler, Springer, 2008
‘The data suggest that, with the possible exception of rare-earth elements, there should not be a shortage of the principal materials required for electricity generation from wind energy. ... Sintered ceramic magnets and rare-earth magnets are the two types of permanent magnets used in wind turbines. Sintered ceramic magnets, comprising iron oxide (ferrite) and barium or strontium carbonate, have a lower cost but generate a lower energy product than do rare-earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron (Nd-Fe-B). The energy-conversion efficiency of sintered Nd-Fe-B is roughly 10 times that of sintered ferrite ... As global requirements for rare-earth elements continue to grow, any sustained increase in demand for neodymium oxide from the wind resource sector would have to be met by increased supply through expansion of existing production or the development of new mines. ... An assessment of available data suggests that wind turbines that use rare earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron require about 216 kg [476 lb] of neodymium per megawatt of capacity, or about 251 kg [553 lb] of neodymium oxide (Nd₂O₃) per megawatt of capacity.’ —Wind Energy in the United States and Materials Required for the Land-Based Wind Turbine Industry From 2010 Through 2030, by U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior, Scientific Investigations Report 2011–5036
‘Five rare earth elements (REEs)—dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium—were found to be critical in the short term (present–2015). These five REEs are used in magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles or phosphors in energy-efficient lighting. ... Permanent magnets (PMs) containing neodymium and dysprosium are used in wind turbine generators and electric vehicle (EV) motors. These REEs have highly valued magnetic and thermal properties. Manufacturers of both technologies are currently making decisions on future system design, trading off the performance benefits of neodymium and dysprosium against vulnerability to potential supply shortages. For example, wind turbine manufacturers are deciding among gear-driven, hybrid and direct-drive systems, with varying levels of rare earth content. ... Neodymium-iron-boron rare earth PMs are used in wind turbines and traction (i.e., propulsion) motors for EVs. ... the use of rare earth PMs in these applications is growing due to the significant performance benefits PMs provide ... Larger turbines are more likely to use rare earth PMs, which can dramatically reduce the size and weight of the generator compared to non-PM designs such as induction or synchronous generators. ... Despite their advantages, slow-speed turbines require larger PMs for a given power rating, translating into greater rare earth content. Arnold Magnetics estimates that direct-drive turbines require 600 kg [1,323 lb] of PM material per megawatt, which translates to several hundred kilograms of rare earth content per megawatt.’ — Critical Materials Strategy, by U.S. Department of Energy, December 2011
‘In the broader literature ..., concerns have been raised about future shortage of supply of neodymium, a metal belonging to the group of rare-earth elements that is increasingly employed in permanent magnets in wind turbine generators.’ —Assessing the life cycle environmental impacts of wind power: a review of present knowledge and research needs, by Anders Arvesen and Edgar G. Hertwich, 2012, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16(8): 5994-6006.
‘A single 3MW [direct-drive] wind turbine needs ... 2 tons of rare earth elements.’ —Northwest Mining Association
Also see:
- Rare earths, minerals used in windpower technology, could fall into short supply, Windpower Engineering & Development, June 4, 2013
- Wind turbine & generator magnets, First4Magnets (‘In every wind turbine and generator you will find one or more incredibly strong magnets. Simplified, the rotating shaft of a wind turbine is connected to one or more strong magnets, usually neodymium magnets, these magnets turn relative to an assembly of coiled wire, generating voltage in the coil.’)
- Neodymium magnets in wind turbines & generators, Stanford Magnets
- Clean energy's dirty little secret, The Atlantic, May 2009
- Are rare earth minerals too costly for environment?, PBS News Hour, December 14, 2009
- In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale, Daily Mail, January 26, 2011
- Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages, The Guardian, August 7, 2012
- Rare earth mining in China: the bleak social and environmental costs, The Guardian, March 20, 2014
- Rare earths: Elemental needs of the clean-energy economy, Scientific American, October 13, 2010 (‘A massive wind turbine—capable of turning the breeze into two million watts of power—has 40-meter-long blades made from fiberglass, towers 90 meters above the ground, weighs hundreds of metric tons, and fundamentally relies on roughly 300 kilograms of a soft, silvery metal known as neodymium—a so-called rare earth. This element forms the basis for the magnets used in the turbines. "Large permanent magnets make the generators feasible," explains materials scientist Alex King, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Iowa, which started making rare earth magnets in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project. The stronger the magnets are, the more powerful the generator—and rare earth elements such as neodymium form the basis for the most powerful permanent magnets around.’)
- The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust, BBC, April 2, 2015
- The dark side of renewable energy, Earth Journalism Network, August 25, 2016
- Poison wind, Today Tonight Adelaide, March 1, 2017 (‘Clarification: This story contains details of toxic pollution associated with the use of rare earths in the production of wind turbines, cars and household electronic items. We wish to clarify that the wind industry estimates one in five turbines in South Australia use rare earths. South Australia has approximately 40 wind farms operating or seeking approval, with almost 700 individual turbines. Using the industry’s figures, South Australia has in excess of 100 turbines which use rare earths, which is a very significant number.’)
- The big eco dilemma: How rare earth metals have become a thorn in the side of the green agenda, RT, July 31, 2021
- New evidence shows massive and rapid expansion of illicit rare earths industry in Myanmar, fuelling human rights abuses, environmental destruction and funding military-linked militias, Global Witness, August 9, 2022
*Lithium: “Industry experts expect demand for lithium from U.S. car manufacturers to increase tenfold by 2030. By then, they predict the U.S. will need 300,000 metric tons of lithium per year to make green vehicles and a wealth of electronic appliances. … But environmentalists note that it would create hundreds of millions of cubic yards of rock waste, and that next to the pit would be an “acid plant” using sulfuric acid — 5,800 tons daily — to process lithium. According to an environmental impact statement from the federal Bureau of Land Management, the mine would be an open pit 2.3 miles long, a mile wide and almost 400 feet deep … the mine would use about 3,000 gallons of water per minute.” —The cost of green energy: The nation’s biggest lithium mine may be going up on a site sacred to Native Americans, NBC News, August 11, 2022
March 23, 2017
Letter in support of proposed wind turbine sound rules
To the Clerk of the Vermont Public Service Board:
I support the proposed wind turbine sound rules as a first step to protect the aural environment of our mountains.
As you know, a quiet rural night in Vermont is likely to have a sound level of only 25 dBA or even less. An increase in ambient noise of 5 dB is recognized as a cause of widespread complaints. So limiting the sound level at night to 35 dBA is not severe but actually rather lenient.
The proposed rule does not address low-frequency noise, which Denmark (the world's leader in wind energy technology and implementation) since 2011 has limited to 20 dBA indoors (10-160 Hz).
Infrasound (which is not heard but instead felt) is also a concern, with many acoustic engineers determining that a C-weighted indoor limit of 50 dB is necessary to protect health.
Nor does the proposed rule address amplitude modulation, the distinct "swish" or "thump" of large wind turbines. In the UK, planning permission for the Den Brook project included a rule to limit amplitude modulation: A 125-ms pulse of 3 dBA or greater (3 dB being the difference in noise level detectable by the human ear) can not occur in any 2-second period five or more times in six or more minutes of any hour, when those minute-long average noise levels are 28 dBA or more.
While these limits, as well as the proposed setback of 10 times the total height from residences (which should be at least 15 times the height, and from property lines, so that people can enjoy all of their property), begin to protect human neighbors, they do nothing to protect the wildlife of the mountains, who in most cases are much more sensitive to sound than humans.
[See also: Proposal and comments for implementing a rule regarding sound from wind generation projects, by Stephen Ambrose]
I support the proposed wind turbine sound rules as a first step to protect the aural environment of our mountains.
As you know, a quiet rural night in Vermont is likely to have a sound level of only 25 dBA or even less. An increase in ambient noise of 5 dB is recognized as a cause of widespread complaints. So limiting the sound level at night to 35 dBA is not severe but actually rather lenient.
The proposed rule does not address low-frequency noise, which Denmark (the world's leader in wind energy technology and implementation) since 2011 has limited to 20 dBA indoors (10-160 Hz).
Infrasound (which is not heard but instead felt) is also a concern, with many acoustic engineers determining that a C-weighted indoor limit of 50 dB is necessary to protect health.
Nor does the proposed rule address amplitude modulation, the distinct "swish" or "thump" of large wind turbines. In the UK, planning permission for the Den Brook project included a rule to limit amplitude modulation: A 125-ms pulse of 3 dBA or greater (3 dB being the difference in noise level detectable by the human ear) can not occur in any 2-second period five or more times in six or more minutes of any hour, when those minute-long average noise levels are 28 dBA or more.
While these limits, as well as the proposed setback of 10 times the total height from residences (which should be at least 15 times the height, and from property lines, so that people can enjoy all of their property), begin to protect human neighbors, they do nothing to protect the wildlife of the mountains, who in most cases are much more sensitive to sound than humans.
[See also: Proposal and comments for implementing a rule regarding sound from wind generation projects, by Stephen Ambrose]
April 7, 2016
Changing Everything
Steven Gorelick writes at Counterpunch:
Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable. In part this is because the fossil fuel corporations – symbolized by the remorseless Koch brothers – will be a relic of the past, replaced by ‘green’ corporations and entrepreneurs that display none of their predecessors’ ruthlessness and greed.
Maybe, but I have my doubts. Here in Vermont, for example, a renewable energy conference last year was titled, “Creating Prosperity and Opportunity Confronting Climate Change”. The event attracted venture capitalists, asset management companies, lawyers that represent renewable energy developers, and even a “brandthropologist” offering advice on “how to evolve Brand Vermont” in light of the climate crisis. The keynote speaker was Jigar Shah, author of Creating Climate Wealth, who pumped up the assembled crowd by telling them that switching to renewables “represents the largest wealth creation opportunity of our generation.” He added that government has a role in making that opportunity real: “policies that incentivize resource efficiency can mean scalable profits for businesses.” If Shah is correct, the profit motive – in less polite company it might be called ‘greed’ – will still be around in a renewable energy future.
But at least the renewable energy corporations will be far more socially responsible than their fossil fuel predecessors. Not if you ask the Zapotec communities in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, who will tell you that a renewable energy corporation can be just as ruthless as a fossil fuel one. Oaxaca is already home to 21 wind projects and 1,600 massive turbines, with more planned. While the indigenous population must live with the wind turbines on their communal lands, the electricity goes to distant urban areas and industries. Local people say they have been intimidated and deceived by the wind corporations: according to one indigenous leader, “They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines.” People have filed grievances with the government (which has actively promoted the wind projects) and have physically blocked access to development sites.
It seems that a transition to renewable energy might not be as transformative as some people hope. Or to put it more bluntly, renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism.
Which brings me to the new film, This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book and directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I saw the film recently at a screening hosted by local climate activists and renewable energy developers, and was at first hopeful that the film would go even further than the book in, as Klein puts it, “connecting the dots between the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.”
But by film’s end one is left with the impression that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is pretty much all that’s needed – not only to address climate change but to transform the economy and solve all the other problems we face. As the camera tracks skyward to reveal banks of solar panels in China or soars above 450-foot tall wind turbines in Germany, the message seems to be that fully committing to these technologies will change everything. This is surprising, since Klein’s book flatly contradicts this way of thinking:
“Over the past decade,” she wrote, “many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech…. They paint a picture of a world that can function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.” Instead, she says, we need “consume less, right away. [But] Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic.”
Overall, Klein’s book is far better at “connecting the dots” than the film. The book explains how free trade treaties have led to a huge spike in emissions, and Klein argues that these agreements need to be renegotiated in ways that will curb both emissions and corporate power. Among other things, she says, “long-haul transport will need to be rationed, reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally.” She explicitly calls for “sensible relocalization” of the economy, as well as reduced consumption and “managed degrowth” in the rich countries of the North – notions likely to curdle the blood of capitalists everywhere. She endorses government incentives for local and seasonal food, as well as land management policies that discourage sprawl and encourage low-energy, local forms of agriculture.
I don’t buy everything about Klein’s arguments: they rest heavily on unquestioned assumptions about the course of ‘development’ in the global South, and focus too much on scaling up government and not enough on scaling down business. The “everything” that will change sometimes seems limited to the ideological pendulum: after decades of pointing towards the neoliberal, free-market right, she believes it must swing back to the left because climate change demands a huge expansion of government planning and support.
Nonetheless, many of the specific steps outlined in the book do have the potential to shift our economic system in important ways. Those steps, however, are given no space at all in the film. The focus is almost entirely on transitioning to renewables, which turns the film into what is essentially an informercial for industrial wind and solar.
The film starts well, debunking the notion that climate change is a product of human nature – of our innate greed and short-sightedness. Instead, Klein says, the problem lies in a “story” we’ve told ourselves for the past 400 years: that Nature is ours to tame, conquer, and extract riches from. In that way, Klein says, “Mother Nature became the mother lode.”
After a gut-wrenching segment on the environmental disaster known as the Alberta tar sands, the film centers on examples of “Blockadia” – a term coined by activists to describe local direct action against extractive industries. There is the Cree community in Alberta fighting the expansion of tar sands development; villagers in India blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant that would eliminate traditional fishing livelihoods; a community on Greece’s Halkidiki Peninsula battling their government and the police to stop an open pit gold mine that would destroy a cherished mountain; and a small-scale goat farmer in Montana joining hands with the local Cheyenne community to oppose a bevy of fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline, a shale oil project, and a new coal mine.
Klein implies that climate change underlies and connects these geographically diverse protests. But that’s partly an artifact of the examples Klein chose, and partly a misreading of the protestors’ motives: what has really driven these communities to resist is not climate change, but a deeply-felt desire to maintain their traditional way of life and to protect land that is sacred to them. A woman in Halkidiki expresses it this way: “we are one with this mountain; we won’t survive without it.” At its heart, the threat that all of these communities face doesn’t stem from fossil fuels, but from a voracious economic system that will sacrifice them and the land they cherish for the sake of profit and growth.
The choice of Halkidiki as an example actually undermines Klein’s construct, since the proposed mine has nothing directly to do with fossil fuels. It does, however, have everything to do with a global economy that runs on growth, corporate profit, and – as Greece knows only too well – debt. So it is with all the other examples in the film.
Klein’s narrative would have been derailed if she profiled the indigenous Zapotec communities of Oaxaca as a Blockadia example: they fit the bill in every respect other than the fact that it’s renewable energy corporations, not fossil fuel corporations, they are trying to block. Similarly, Klein’s argument would have suffered if she visited villagers in India who are threatened not by a coal-fired power plant, but by one of India’s regulation-free corporate enclaves known as “special economic zones”. These, too, have sparked protests and police violence against villagers: in Nandigram in West Bengal, 14 villagers were killed trying to keep their way of life from being eliminated, their lands turned into another outpost of an expanding global economy.
And while the tar sands region is undeniably an ecological disaster, it bears many similarities to the huge toxic lake on what was once pastureland in Baotou, on the edge of China’s Gobi Desert. The area is the source of nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals – used in almost every high-tech gadget (as well as in the magnets needed for electric cars and industrial wind turbines). The mine tailings and effluent from the many factories processing these metals have created an environmental disaster of truly monumental proportions: the BBC describes it as “the worst place on earth”. A significant shrinking of global consumer demand would help reduce Baotou’s toxic lake, but it’s hard to see how a shift to renewable energy would.
Too often, climate change has been used as a Trojan horse to enable corporate interests to despoil local environments or override the concerns of local communities. Klein acknowledges this in her book: by viewing climate change only on a global scale, she writes, we end up ignoring “people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a ‘solution’. This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years … [including] when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling… solar arrays without local participation or consent.” But this warning is conspicuously absent from the film.
Klein’s premise is that climate change is the one issue that can unite people globally for economic change, but there’s a more strategic way to look at it. What we face is not only a climate crisis but literally hundreds of potentially devastating crises: there’s the widening gap between rich and poor, islands of plastic in the oceans, depleted topsoil and groundwater, a rise in fundamentalism and terror, growing piles of toxic and nuclear waste, the gutting of local communities and economies, the erosion of democracy, the epidemic of depression, and many more. Few of these can be easily linked to climate change, but all of them can be traced back to the global economy.
This point is made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, who explains how a scaling-down of the corporate-led global economy and a strengthening of diverse, localized economies would simultaneously address all of the most serious problems we face – including climate change. For this reason, what Norberg-Hodge calls ‘big picture activism’ has the potential to unite climate change activists, small farmers, peace advocates, environmentalists, social justice groups, labor unions, indigenous rights activists, main street business owners, and many more under a single banner. If all these groups connect the dots to see the corporate-led economy as a root cause of the problems they face, it could give rise to a global movement powerful enough to halt the corporate juggernaut.
And that really could change everything.
Also see: : Oaxaca on this blog, and “Exploitation and destruction: some things to know about industrial wind power”
Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact on greenhouse gas emissions: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable. In part this is because the fossil fuel corporations – symbolized by the remorseless Koch brothers – will be a relic of the past, replaced by ‘green’ corporations and entrepreneurs that display none of their predecessors’ ruthlessness and greed.
Maybe, but I have my doubts. Here in Vermont, for example, a renewable energy conference last year was titled, “Creating Prosperity and Opportunity Confronting Climate Change”. The event attracted venture capitalists, asset management companies, lawyers that represent renewable energy developers, and even a “brandthropologist” offering advice on “how to evolve Brand Vermont” in light of the climate crisis. The keynote speaker was Jigar Shah, author of Creating Climate Wealth, who pumped up the assembled crowd by telling them that switching to renewables “represents the largest wealth creation opportunity of our generation.” He added that government has a role in making that opportunity real: “policies that incentivize resource efficiency can mean scalable profits for businesses.” If Shah is correct, the profit motive – in less polite company it might be called ‘greed’ – will still be around in a renewable energy future.
But at least the renewable energy corporations will be far more socially responsible than their fossil fuel predecessors. Not if you ask the Zapotec communities in Mexico’s Oaxaca state, who will tell you that a renewable energy corporation can be just as ruthless as a fossil fuel one. Oaxaca is already home to 21 wind projects and 1,600 massive turbines, with more planned. While the indigenous population must live with the wind turbines on their communal lands, the electricity goes to distant urban areas and industries. Local people say they have been intimidated and deceived by the wind corporations: according to one indigenous leader, “They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines.” People have filed grievances with the government (which has actively promoted the wind projects) and have physically blocked access to development sites.
It seems that a transition to renewable energy might not be as transformative as some people hope. Or to put it more bluntly, renewable energy changes nothing about corporate capitalism.
Which brings me to the new film, This Changes Everything, based on Naomi Klein’s best-selling book and directed by her husband, Avi Lewis. I saw the film recently at a screening hosted by local climate activists and renewable energy developers, and was at first hopeful that the film would go even further than the book in, as Klein puts it, “connecting the dots between the carbon in the air and the economic system that put it there.”
But by film’s end one is left with the impression that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is pretty much all that’s needed – not only to address climate change but to transform the economy and solve all the other problems we face. As the camera tracks skyward to reveal banks of solar panels in China or soars above 450-foot tall wind turbines in Germany, the message seems to be that fully committing to these technologies will change everything. This is surprising, since Klein’s book flatly contradicts this way of thinking:
“Over the past decade,” she wrote, “many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of green tech…. They paint a picture of a world that can function pretty much as it does now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we can consume away without worrying about the impact.” Instead, she says, we need “consume less, right away. [But] Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic.”
Overall, Klein’s book is far better at “connecting the dots” than the film. The book explains how free trade treaties have led to a huge spike in emissions, and Klein argues that these agreements need to be renegotiated in ways that will curb both emissions and corporate power. Among other things, she says, “long-haul transport will need to be rationed, reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally.” She explicitly calls for “sensible relocalization” of the economy, as well as reduced consumption and “managed degrowth” in the rich countries of the North – notions likely to curdle the blood of capitalists everywhere. She endorses government incentives for local and seasonal food, as well as land management policies that discourage sprawl and encourage low-energy, local forms of agriculture.
I don’t buy everything about Klein’s arguments: they rest heavily on unquestioned assumptions about the course of ‘development’ in the global South, and focus too much on scaling up government and not enough on scaling down business. The “everything” that will change sometimes seems limited to the ideological pendulum: after decades of pointing towards the neoliberal, free-market right, she believes it must swing back to the left because climate change demands a huge expansion of government planning and support.
Nonetheless, many of the specific steps outlined in the book do have the potential to shift our economic system in important ways. Those steps, however, are given no space at all in the film. The focus is almost entirely on transitioning to renewables, which turns the film into what is essentially an informercial for industrial wind and solar.
The film starts well, debunking the notion that climate change is a product of human nature – of our innate greed and short-sightedness. Instead, Klein says, the problem lies in a “story” we’ve told ourselves for the past 400 years: that Nature is ours to tame, conquer, and extract riches from. In that way, Klein says, “Mother Nature became the mother lode.”
After a gut-wrenching segment on the environmental disaster known as the Alberta tar sands, the film centers on examples of “Blockadia” – a term coined by activists to describe local direct action against extractive industries. There is the Cree community in Alberta fighting the expansion of tar sands development; villagers in India blocking construction of a coal-fired power plant that would eliminate traditional fishing livelihoods; a community on Greece’s Halkidiki Peninsula battling their government and the police to stop an open pit gold mine that would destroy a cherished mountain; and a small-scale goat farmer in Montana joining hands with the local Cheyenne community to oppose a bevy of fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline, a shale oil project, and a new coal mine.
Klein implies that climate change underlies and connects these geographically diverse protests. But that’s partly an artifact of the examples Klein chose, and partly a misreading of the protestors’ motives: what has really driven these communities to resist is not climate change, but a deeply-felt desire to maintain their traditional way of life and to protect land that is sacred to them. A woman in Halkidiki expresses it this way: “we are one with this mountain; we won’t survive without it.” At its heart, the threat that all of these communities face doesn’t stem from fossil fuels, but from a voracious economic system that will sacrifice them and the land they cherish for the sake of profit and growth.
The choice of Halkidiki as an example actually undermines Klein’s construct, since the proposed mine has nothing directly to do with fossil fuels. It does, however, have everything to do with a global economy that runs on growth, corporate profit, and – as Greece knows only too well – debt. So it is with all the other examples in the film.
Klein’s narrative would have been derailed if she profiled the indigenous Zapotec communities of Oaxaca as a Blockadia example: they fit the bill in every respect other than the fact that it’s renewable energy corporations, not fossil fuel corporations, they are trying to block. Similarly, Klein’s argument would have suffered if she visited villagers in India who are threatened not by a coal-fired power plant, but by one of India’s regulation-free corporate enclaves known as “special economic zones”. These, too, have sparked protests and police violence against villagers: in Nandigram in West Bengal, 14 villagers were killed trying to keep their way of life from being eliminated, their lands turned into another outpost of an expanding global economy.
And while the tar sands region is undeniably an ecological disaster, it bears many similarities to the huge toxic lake on what was once pastureland in Baotou, on the edge of China’s Gobi Desert. The area is the source of nearly two-thirds of the world’s rare earth metals – used in almost every high-tech gadget (as well as in the magnets needed for electric cars and industrial wind turbines). The mine tailings and effluent from the many factories processing these metals have created an environmental disaster of truly monumental proportions: the BBC describes it as “the worst place on earth”. A significant shrinking of global consumer demand would help reduce Baotou’s toxic lake, but it’s hard to see how a shift to renewable energy would.
Too often, climate change has been used as a Trojan horse to enable corporate interests to despoil local environments or override the concerns of local communities. Klein acknowledges this in her book: by viewing climate change only on a global scale, she writes, we end up ignoring “people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a ‘solution’. This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years … [including] when policymakers ram through industrial-scale wind farms and sprawling… solar arrays without local participation or consent.” But this warning is conspicuously absent from the film.
Klein’s premise is that climate change is the one issue that can unite people globally for economic change, but there’s a more strategic way to look at it. What we face is not only a climate crisis but literally hundreds of potentially devastating crises: there’s the widening gap between rich and poor, islands of plastic in the oceans, depleted topsoil and groundwater, a rise in fundamentalism and terror, growing piles of toxic and nuclear waste, the gutting of local communities and economies, the erosion of democracy, the epidemic of depression, and many more. Few of these can be easily linked to climate change, but all of them can be traced back to the global economy.
This point is made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures, who explains how a scaling-down of the corporate-led global economy and a strengthening of diverse, localized economies would simultaneously address all of the most serious problems we face – including climate change. For this reason, what Norberg-Hodge calls ‘big picture activism’ has the potential to unite climate change activists, small farmers, peace advocates, environmentalists, social justice groups, labor unions, indigenous rights activists, main street business owners, and many more under a single banner. If all these groups connect the dots to see the corporate-led economy as a root cause of the problems they face, it could give rise to a global movement powerful enough to halt the corporate juggernaut.
And that really could change everything.
Also see: : Oaxaca on this blog, and “Exploitation and destruction: some things to know about industrial wind power”
November 14, 2015
I stand with the trees and watch with the raptors.
Our friends at AWEO.org received a not untypically incoherent letter of complaint recently, which they haved shared with your editor. It came from Alabama, but I do not publish the author’s name, instead encouraging him to stop misdirecting his own energies, both negative and positive.
You could more effectively direct your energies to environmental and health consequences of millions of acres of oceans, atmosphere polluted by nuclear radiation and from fossil coal, and oil burning which is killing entire forests, poisoning sea life, and manifests health conseuqences for hundreds of millions if not billions of populations who can barely breathe in cities choked with pollution.AWEO replied as follows, and after several days have not received a reply in turn.
I stand with the trees and the raptors.
Your ignorance of the inetivable course of humanity in its greed for energy is an outrage. Complaining that governments waste money or that wind power engineering in its inefficiencies and pre-maturity or unsightlyness should be stopped in its tracks; pretending to prevent exploit of secondary 'renewable', in fact inexhaustible, solar wind and wave power would condemn centuries of windmills which have proven their utility and innocence for generations.
Soon the spectre of your poor ignorance will be redundant. Meso-scale changes in global weather perhaps even completely uncorrelated with the burning of dinosaurs and biomass which you prefer to ignore are forecast to endanger significant proportion of global populations living near seacoasts, and diminish those winds which, if properly exploited, might provide some glimmer of an alternative for the energy needs of billions on this planet.
Enjoy the weather.
You claim to stand with the trees and the raptors, yet you would have the former leveled and the latter decimated to build enough wind towers to provide any meaningful fraction of our electricity needs — and only when the wind happens to be blowing in the right direction at the right speed, and never mind our other energy needs.
Obviously our efforts should be directed at cleaning up and reducing our actual energy use, not at pretending to provide alternatives that remain and ever will remain sideshows at best. But worse, they are sideshows increasingly destructive of landscape and wild habitat, as well as costly wastes of resources.
December 7, 2014
Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change?
So Rebecca Solnit asks in today's New York Times Magazine, going on to show that she is indeed.
She begins by describing the remains of a bird scorched to death by the Ivanpah concentrated solar power facility, which has paved over a chunk of the desert "nearly five times the size of Central Park" (3,500 acres, to produce, according to Solnit, 392 megawatts of power at full capacity).
However, it can generate at that rate only when sun position and atmospheric conditions are ideal. The developers themselves project an average output of 30% capacity, or a total annual generation of just over 1,000,000 megawatt-hours. With an average household use of 10 megawatt-hours per year, that's equivalent to the electricity use of 100,000 households, not 140,000 as Solnit writes.
Therein lie her first manipulations of the story. Besides exaggerating the projected output of the Ivanpah facility and ignoring the fact that actual output has not been reported and is almost invariably much less than projected, as well as not considering the loss of at least 3,500 acres of desert habitat (new roads and transmission corridors were also built; desert tortoises were forcibly moved out), she uses the deceptive industry practice of expressing output in terms of "homes served". Domestic use of electricity represents only around 35% of the total. So in terms of total per-capita electricity use, the projected output of the Ivanpah facility would be equivalent to only the total amount used by the people from only 35,000 households.
And it would provide electricity for none at night. And electrical energy represents less than 40% of our total energy use. So the benefit in terms of reducing the use of other fuels becomes negligible. Considering the vast resources required to build the facility and the vast amount of land required to harness the energy, this hardly seems a wise path.
[Update: In fact, the actual generation of electricity from the Ivanpah facility is reported to and by the Department of Energy. Those data can be daunting to sift through, but more than a month ago it was reported by Pete Danko at Breaking Energy that production was running well under 40% of what was projected (ie, less than 14,000 households, one tenth Solnit's claim), and that use of "auxiliary" natural gas had to be increased by 60%.]
Some waterfowl mistake that shining sea of mirrors for a real lake, so they try to land on it. But without water to launch themselves back into the air, they’re stranded, prey for coyotes or doomed to die of thirst or hunger. Other birds fly into Ivanpah, where, dazzled by glare, they collide with the mirrors or towers. Still others are scorched by the heat and fall to their deaths.A second manipulation is in presenting the figure of "only 321" recovered bird corpses without context. Every such survey calculates an estimated "true" figure from such a sampling, considering imperfect recovery and loss to predators (such as the coyotes that Solnit mentions). In other words, Solnit's low figure, which she presents as final, is in fact only the starting point towards a much higher estimate.
It’s this last form of avian death that became news. In August, The Atlantic described Ivanpah “incinerating” birds in flight; The Associated Press reported that wildlife investigators saw birds “ignite,” and that birds “burned and fell” every two minutes. Ivanpah’s corporate website noted that a death every two minutes would mean 100,000 dead birds a year, while only 321 dead and injured birds had been recovered. The actual number of deaths seems to be well above the power plant’s tally and far below the number reported by The Associated Press. But birds do die there, in many ways.
But who cares, Solnit implies, because she's looking at the big picture. Let's not talk about what's actually happening at the Ivanpah facility, or whether the Ivanpah facility's benefits are enough to justify its harms, because climate change is a much bigger issue. And if you insist on worrying about the birds being killed there (or the displaced tortoises), you obviously don't care about climate change.
Supporters of fossil fuel and deniers of climate change love to trade in stories like the one about Ivanpah, individual tales that make renewable energy seem counterproductive, perverse. Stories cannot so readily capture the far larger avian death toll from coal, gas and nuclear power generation. Benjamin Sovacool, an energy-policy expert, looked into the deaths of birds at wind farms (where the blades can chop them down) and concluded that per gigawatt hour, nuclear power plants kill more than twice as many birds and fossil-fuel plants kill more than 30 times as many. He noted that over the course of a year fossil-fuel plants in the United States actually kill about 24 million birds, compared to 46,000 by wind farms. His calculations factor in climate change as part of their deadly impact.That paragraph, typical of the logic of big energy apologists, is an absolute muddle. First, "individual tales" are precisely what make the climate change story compelling. So why write off these particular victims as something less? Yes, the toll from other sources of energy is much greater — that's because they represent a much greater proportion of our energy. Non-hydro renewable energy is still — and will likely always remain, because of its intermittency and variability — in the low single percentage points. And that's just electrical energy, which, recall, is less than 40% of total energy use.
So the question is not who kills more, but what can be done to kill less. Without meaningfully reducing our use of other fuels, giant wind and solar facilities are only adding to the toll, not reducing it.
Furthermore, the factoring of climate change in the calculation of bird deaths is the flip side of citing "only 321" bird corpses. It's meaningless. It's particularly questionable in the case of nuclear power, which does not emit carbon and so does not contribute to climate change (at least by that means).
Besides being manipulative, it is also simplistic, ignoring the fact that wind turbines, for example, are a particular danger to raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, owls), whose populations (never mind the individuals!) are already challenged by habitat loss to humans. It ignores the toll on bats. And it ignores the huge increase of human land use (so much of it for supporting livestock, which represents massive deforestation, water depletion and pollution, and emissions of methane, which has 25 times the greenhouse effect of CO₂), ie, destruction of natural habitat, obviously the greatest barrier to plant and animal survival, resilience, and adaptation to climate change.
For a while our eyes were on the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans, victims of the 2010 BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The devastation of the region is no longer news, but scientists, who track data for long unnewsworthy swathes of time, have found that the spill has killed more than 600,000 birds. It is still killing sea turtles and bottlenose dolphins and contaminating the seafood in areas where human beings fish. ... A recent Audubon Society report on climate change concludes: “Of the 588 North American bird species Audubon studied, more than half are likely to be in trouble. Our models indicate that 314 species will lose more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080. Of the 314 species at risk from global warming, 126 of them are classified as climate endangered. These birds are projected to lose more than 50 percent of their current range by 2050.”The latter part of the preceding excerpt points to the loss of habitat as being as much a problem as climate change. And the former part is relevant to oil use, but irrelevant to the toll at Ivanpah — because oil is used for transport and heating (and lubricating wind turbines and insulating their transformers), not for generating electricity. And again, these deaths are due to a catastrophic well blowout, not to climate change.
The technology for wind and solar farms can still be improved, but they are among the few remedies we have to the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. All over the world, renewable energy is proliferating — even on the plains of West Texas, there are now wind turbines among the fracking wells. Wind and solar are not only problems but solutions to the deadliness of the fossil fuel industry, whether it’s through routine devastation, as with tar sands, or catastrophic accidents, as with the BP spill, or the sabotage of the whole planetary system by climate change.Having raising the unquestionable harms of an oil spill, now Solnit more directly contrasts it to wind and solar, even though, again, oil is not used for electricity. Even if wind and solar were everything their promoters claim (including the eternal canard that next year's technology and planning will solve all problems so don't worry about the continuing harm from last year's which if you think should be decommissioned you must really hate the planet), they would not change anything about oil at all. Insisting that wind and solar will save us almost seems a means of shrugging off the real problems of oil use, eg, that it is our use of it that drives all that drilling. Pave the desert with solar panels, string wind turbines across the mountain ridges: Just don't look, as Solnit's title suggests, at the big picture. Instead: Blame everything on climate change, and justify everything as fighting climate change.
She ends with a fire-and-brimstone vision of absolute calamity. She may not be wrong, but she would have us accept the deaths of birds and bats and the massive loss of habitat from building giant wind and solar projects as a distraction from the calamities due to climate change. That is exactly the self-rationalizing casuistry that guarantees — and justifies — only more calamity.
Update:
- “Hunting, fishing and other forms of exploitation are a major factor in declines in animal populations .... Habitat degradation and loss are also dominant threats. Climate change is expected to become a bigger factor over time.” —Life – a status report, Nature 516, 158–161 (11 December 2014)
- “Before human populations swelled to the point at which we could denude whole forests and wipe out entire animal populations, extinction rates were at least ten times lower. And the future does not look any brighter. Climate change and the spread of invasive species (often facilitated by humans) will drive extinction rates only higher.” —Protect and serve, Nature 516, 144 (11 December 2014)
- ‘Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.
‘In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.
‘“Habitat destruction, pollution or overfishing either kills off wild creatures and plants or leaves them badly weakened,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. “The trouble is that in coming decades, the additional threat of worsening climate change will become more and more pronounced and could then kill off these survivors.”’ —Earth faces sixth ‘great extinction’ with 41% of amphibians set to go the way of the dodo, The Observer, 14 December 2014
December 1, 2014
Evil masterminds behind citizen opposition to evil masterminds
Here’s a mildly fun game. The New York Times’ crusade against Russia has become such a caricature of cold-war-era propaganda that it now resembles the tirades against the Koch brothers for forcing all of us to burn fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow and duping us into opposing the turning of our last rural and wild places into industrial wind and solar energy facilities.
On Nov. 30, the Times published an article by Andrew Higgins titled “Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests”. As with most such openly propagandistic pieces at the Times, the article is not opened to comments. The article is reminiscent of one at The Guardian on June 19 reporting then Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s claim that Russia is “secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking”. Yes, the choice is between fracking (injecting a slew of toxic chemicals into the ground at high pressure to fracture rocks and release deposits of methane, much of which is released into the air, with some 25 times the greenhouse gas effect of CO₂) and ... what, exactly?
In each of these articles, one can simply substitute Russia with Exxon, Putin with the Koch Brothers, and fracking with wind turbines and, as if they were written from a “Mad Libs” template, one has another typical article that avoids the actual issue involved, rather evoking a vague powerful network of “astroturf” organizations surely backed by a nefarious puppetmaster. The articles flip the power relationship to portray the frackers/wind developers as victims of the monstrous power of local opposition. The local officials who thought it was fine to sell out their communities are left scratching their heads, cursing (and having it dutifully reported) what they can only assume (out of their own worldview) to be “well financed and well organized” opposition instead of acknowledging the power of democracy and information. The lack of evidence for the charges only proves how powerful the evil geniuses behind it really are. The fact that people across the social and political spectrum unite against these developments is also presented as proof that they can only be paid agents – or gullible dupes – instead of recognized, even celebrated, as the populist power of a common cause.
In the Guardian article, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth laugh at Rasmussen’s claim. Maybe those groups should reconsider their own demonization campaigns against people who oppose large-scale wind and solar developments in rural and wild areas.
November 16, 2014
Wind Turbines and Health: A Critical Review of a Critical Review of the Scientific Literature
J Occup Environ Med. 2014 Nov;56(11):e108-30. Robert J. McCunney, MD, MPH, Kenneth A. Mundt, PhD, W. David Colby, MD, Robert Dobie, MD, Kenneth Kaliski, BE, PE, and Mark Blais, PsyD
Objective: This review examines the literature related to health effects of wind turbines. Methods: We reviewed literature related to sound measurements near turbines, epidemiological and experimental studies, and factors associated with annoyance. Results: (1) Infrasound sound near wind turbines does not exceed audibility thresholds. (2) Epidemiological studies have shown associations between living near wind turbines and annoyance. (3) Infrasound and low-frequency sound do not present unique health risks. (4) Annoyance seems more strongly related to individual characteristics than noise from turbines. Discussion: Further areas of inquiry include enhanced noise characterization, analysis of predicted noise values contrasted with measured levels postinstallation, longitudinal assessments of health pre- and postinstallation, experimental studies in which subjects are “blinded” to the presence or absence of infrasound, and enhanced measurement techniques to evaluate annoyance.
Brief critique by Eric Rosenbloom:
“The Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) funded this project ....” McCunney and Colby had already prepared a similar review for the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations (which are industry lobby groups) in 2009.
The paper consistently implies that the inaudibility of infrasound makes it nonproblematic, but by definition infrasound is inaudible and there is a substantial body of research showing that it is indeed harmful. The review ignores conference papers and so bypasses the issue of measurable infrasound inside homes as well as the unique characteristics of wind turbine noise as presented by many acousticians.
In its assessment of epidemiologic studies, the review rigorously critiques those that correlate wind turbine proximity and health problems while accepting without question those that find no such correlation (for example, a Polish study by industry consultants). In all cases that attempt to correlate complaints with noise levels, the latter are only estimated and characterized as continuous dBA tones. The paper picks out for special praise surveys that set out to prove “psychogenic” causes of health problems, which could not be more biased. This section concludes with a warning against the “mistaking of correlation with causation”, which only underscores the authors’ desperation to dismiss health problems as pre-existing and to ignore the consistent evidence that those health problems disappear when people move away or spend time away from the wind turbines (which they would no doubt only view as more evidence that they are indeed psychogenic, as if people willingly suffer physically in their homes but not when they are forced to abandon them). And again, they insist on the quotidian nature of wind turbine noise as being no different from ocean waves or air conditioning, ignoring the ever-growing documentation that it is indeed unique, and uniquely disturbing to many. As with other complaints, the review dismisses sleep disturbance as a fault of the sufferer, not the giant wind turbine thumping away all night. This bias is simply repeated in the next section that examines – and dismisses concerns about – infrasound and low-frequency noise. Again, the paper even denies that any infrasound and/or low-frequency noise (let alone that from wind turbines) can affect health, despite decades of research showing otherwise.
Continuing in this vein, the review of annoyance (a health effect according to the World Health Organization) examines only efforts to show it to be due only to the complainant’s psychology, not actual noise. The review unsurprisingly gives pride of place to the “nocebo” theory that nonsensically blames complaints on the publicity of them.
In its conclusion, the review cites the World Health Organization’s Night Noise Guidelines as a non sequitur vindication that wind turbine noise is not a problem, but fails to note that those guidelines specify an outside limit of 30 dB, which no jurisdiction on earth enforces, let alone regulation of amplitude modulation and infrasound, or even adequate setback distances, all of which the wind power industry fiercely fights (eg). The review itself makes no siting or regulatory recommendations (which might harm the industry paying for this review), instead placing the entire blame for problems on those who suffer them. A shameful performance.
Objective: This review examines the literature related to health effects of wind turbines. Methods: We reviewed literature related to sound measurements near turbines, epidemiological and experimental studies, and factors associated with annoyance. Results: (1) Infrasound sound near wind turbines does not exceed audibility thresholds. (2) Epidemiological studies have shown associations between living near wind turbines and annoyance. (3) Infrasound and low-frequency sound do not present unique health risks. (4) Annoyance seems more strongly related to individual characteristics than noise from turbines. Discussion: Further areas of inquiry include enhanced noise characterization, analysis of predicted noise values contrasted with measured levels postinstallation, longitudinal assessments of health pre- and postinstallation, experimental studies in which subjects are “blinded” to the presence or absence of infrasound, and enhanced measurement techniques to evaluate annoyance.
Brief critique by Eric Rosenbloom:
“The Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) funded this project ....” McCunney and Colby had already prepared a similar review for the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations (which are industry lobby groups) in 2009.
The paper consistently implies that the inaudibility of infrasound makes it nonproblematic, but by definition infrasound is inaudible and there is a substantial body of research showing that it is indeed harmful. The review ignores conference papers and so bypasses the issue of measurable infrasound inside homes as well as the unique characteristics of wind turbine noise as presented by many acousticians.
In its assessment of epidemiologic studies, the review rigorously critiques those that correlate wind turbine proximity and health problems while accepting without question those that find no such correlation (for example, a Polish study by industry consultants). In all cases that attempt to correlate complaints with noise levels, the latter are only estimated and characterized as continuous dBA tones. The paper picks out for special praise surveys that set out to prove “psychogenic” causes of health problems, which could not be more biased. This section concludes with a warning against the “mistaking of correlation with causation”, which only underscores the authors’ desperation to dismiss health problems as pre-existing and to ignore the consistent evidence that those health problems disappear when people move away or spend time away from the wind turbines (which they would no doubt only view as more evidence that they are indeed psychogenic, as if people willingly suffer physically in their homes but not when they are forced to abandon them). And again, they insist on the quotidian nature of wind turbine noise as being no different from ocean waves or air conditioning, ignoring the ever-growing documentation that it is indeed unique, and uniquely disturbing to many. As with other complaints, the review dismisses sleep disturbance as a fault of the sufferer, not the giant wind turbine thumping away all night. This bias is simply repeated in the next section that examines – and dismisses concerns about – infrasound and low-frequency noise. Again, the paper even denies that any infrasound and/or low-frequency noise (let alone that from wind turbines) can affect health, despite decades of research showing otherwise.
Continuing in this vein, the review of annoyance (a health effect according to the World Health Organization) examines only efforts to show it to be due only to the complainant’s psychology, not actual noise. The review unsurprisingly gives pride of place to the “nocebo” theory that nonsensically blames complaints on the publicity of them.
In its conclusion, the review cites the World Health Organization’s Night Noise Guidelines as a non sequitur vindication that wind turbine noise is not a problem, but fails to note that those guidelines specify an outside limit of 30 dB, which no jurisdiction on earth enforces, let alone regulation of amplitude modulation and infrasound, or even adequate setback distances, all of which the wind power industry fiercely fights (eg). The review itself makes no siting or regulatory recommendations (which might harm the industry paying for this review), instead placing the entire blame for problems on those who suffer them. A shameful performance.
October 4, 2014
Wind turbine setback and noise regulations since 2010
These changes in and new wind turbine regulations since 2010 do not include moratoria and bans. See also the list at Windpowergrab and the Renewable Energy Rejection Database (USA).
All ordinances in USA: WindExchange (Dept. of Energy) wind energy ordinances database;
NREL: Wind Ordinances, Wind Regulations by Region;
NCSL: State approaches to wind facility siting (local or state-level).
[note: 1,000 ft = 305 m; 550 m = 1,804 ft; 1,000 m = 1 km = 3,281 ft = 0.62 mi; 1 mi = 1.61 km = 5,280 ft; about decibels (dB)]
- Burt County, Nebraska, Dec. 11, 2024: height limit 690 ft, no more than 20 in county; setbacks 3 mi from towns, 1 mi from property lines, 0.5 mile from residences, 1,000 ft from roads; noise limit 40 dB at exterior wall of nonparticipating residence, 50 dB at participating residence; no shadow flicker on roads; bond for road repair, bond for 150% estimated decommissioning cost [link]
- Honolulu, Hawaii, December 2024: setback from property lines changed from 1× height to greater of 10× height or 1.25 mi; noise limit 10 dB over ambient at occupied buildings; shadow flicker limit 10 hours per year, 10 minutes per day at occupied buildings [link]
- Washington County, Iowa, Dec. 10, 2024 [proposed]: 1 mile from residences, schools, libraries, churches, publicly owned conservation areas and parks, and city limits; noise limit 55 dBA at residences, shadow flicker limit of 30 hr/year and 30 min/day; $25,000 escrow account for conflict resolution; property value guarantee to nonparticipating property owners within 2 mi from project boundary; no vibration or increased sediment in water wells on nonparticipating properties; identification of migratory flyways and nesting areas for birds, bats and endangered species within 1 mi [link]
- Sardinia, Dec. 4, 2024: wind and solar facilities limited to 1% of Sardinia’s territory [link]
- West Hants Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Sept. 24, 2024 [requires ministerial approval]: setback 2.5 km from property line without landowner approval [link]
- Floyd County, Iowa, Aug. 6, 2024: 450 ft max height; to be examined: no turbines on highly productive soils (≥79.5 CSR), reduce sound limit from 50 dB to 40 dB [link]
- Rangeley, Maine, July 24, 2024 [proposed]: max 250 kW, 100 ft height, 35 dBA for contiguous 5 min beyond property line, no dBC beyond property line [link]
- Knox County, Nebraska, July 24, 2024: setback increased from 2,000 ft to 1.5 mi (6,600 ft) from nonparticipating dwellings [link]
- India, July 4, 2024: setback 500 m from any residential cluster (≥15 homes) [link]
- Pottawattamie County, Iowa, Feb. 27, 2024: setbacks 1/2 mi from nonparticipating homes, 1.1× height from participating homes, 1,500 ft from lot lines and public rights of way, 3 mi to incorporated municipalities, airport property, conservation partks, and habitat areas; 412 ft max height; noise limit 40 dBA 1-hour LEq 25 ft outside nonparticipating home; max 30 hours/year shadow flicker at nonparticipating home [link]
- Slovakia, Jan. 2024: setback 3 km from inhabited areas [link]
- New South Wales, Australia, Nov. 2023 [draft]: noise limit 35 dBA or existing background noise level (LA90(10 min)) plus 5 dBA at residences (whichever is lower) [link]
- Thuringia, Germany, Aug. 2023 [overturned by federal court November 2023]: ban on wind turbines in forests [link]
- Jefferson County, Nebraska, Mar. 23, 2023: setback 1 mi from nonparticipating homes, incorporated towns, schools, churches, and state-owned recreation areas [link]
- Buffalo County, Nebraska, Mar. 14, 2023: setbacks 3 mi from agriculture residential zoned property, nonparticipating property, church, hospital, pool, or park, 5 mi from villages, cities, and wildlife preservation and management areas, 2 mi from burial sites, Platte River, and South Loup River [link]
- Poland, Mar. 2023 [effective July 2, 2024]: setback 700 m [2,300 ft] from houses [link]
- Iowa, Jan. 9, 2023 [proposed]: setback from dwelling or nonparticipating property greater of 1.5× height or 5,000 ft [link]
- Woodbury County, Iowa, August 23, 2022: setback from residences increased from 1,250 ft to 2,500 ft [link]
- Stockbridge Township, Michigan, Aug. 2022: height limit 400 ft [link]
- Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, June 22, 2022: setback from dwellings increased from 600 to 1,000 m; 3.2 km from main Wentworth Valley road [link]
- Grand Forks County, North Dakota, June 2022: setback increased from 1/4 to 1/2 mi; shadow flicker limited to 30 h/yr [link]
- Leroy Township, Michigan, May 8, 2022: height limit 400 ft [link]
- Gage County, Nebraska, Nov. 17, 2021: noise limit at residence reduced to 40 dB (from 45) daytime and 37 dBA (from 40) nighttime (10pm–7am), or 3 dBA max 10-minute Leq above ambient [link]
- Ohio, Oct. 11, 2021: counties have right to veto, ban, and limit projects; several counties subsequently prohibited wind projects ≥5 MW in 2022 [link]
- Vermillion County, Indiana, Sept. 28, 2021: setback 2 mi from property lines and roads; noise limit 32 dBA [link]
- Ford County, Illinois, Sept. 17, 2021: setbacks 3,000 ft from property line, 1.5 mi from municipality; noise limit 40 dB (Laeq) 9pm–6am; no shadow flicker at neighboring residence [link]
- Sidney Township, Michigan, July 5, 2021: 300 ft height limit; setback 3,000 ft or 5× height [sic] from nonparticipating property line or right-of-way, 2.5 mi from lake or pond; noise limits of 40 dBA Leq (1 sec) and 50 dBC Leq (1 sec) and no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property; no radio, TV, or other interference [link]
- Pierson Township, Michigan, June 15, 2021: setback 4× height from occupied structures and property lines, 39 dBA limit and no shadow flicker on neighboring property [link]
- Boone County, Missouri, Nov. 4, 2021: 80 m (~263 ft) hub height limit; setback 1,750 ft from property line or public right-of-way; noise limits at property line 50 dBA daytime (7am–10pm), 40 dBA nighttime (10pm-7am), 45 dBA adjusted total day-night (Ldn; 10 dBA added to nighttime level) [link]
- Dakota County, Nebraska, July 26, 2021: change of setbacks from 2,700 ft to 2 mi from neighboring residence, from 600 ft to 2 mi from wetlands and other conservation lands [link]
- Ellington Township, Michigan, July 2021: setbacks 5× height from property lines, 3× height from roads; 40 dBA limit and no shadow flicker on neighboring property [link]
- Worth County, Iowa, approved by Planning and Zoning Commission June 25, 2021: at nonparticipating property: distance greater of 1,600 ft, 3.75× height, or manufacturer’s safety distance, noise limit greater of ambient or 45 dBA/60 dBC 6am–10pm, 40 dBA/60 dBC 10pm–6am, no shadow flicker; setbacks from eagle nest greater of 1,600 ft, 3.75× height, or manufacturer’s safety distance, 1/2 mi from public recreation area, significant body of water, and habitat >40 acres, 1 mi from public recreation area [link]
- Clarion County, Pennsylvania, May 25, 2021: at nonparticipating residence: distance 5× height, noise limit 45 dBA, no shadow flicker [link]
- Texas, proposed May 19, 2021: WB 1003: setback of 3.000 ft from property line [link]
- Texas, introduced Mar. 29, 2021: HB 4007: setback greater of 5,280 ft (1 mi) from property line or 10× height from structure on neighboring property [link]
- Kansas, introduced Feb. 24, 2021: SB 279: setbacks greater of 7,920 ft (1-1/2 mi) or 12× height from residential property or public building, greater of 3 mi or 12× height from any airport, wildlife refuge, public hunting area, or public park, and greater of 5,280 ft (1 mi) or 10× height from nonparticipating property line [link]
- Vulcan County, Alberta, Canada, Jan. 27, 2021 [proposed]: 45 dBA noise limit at property line; 800 m setback from nonparticipating residence [link]
- Burt County, Nebraska, 2020: setback greater of 3.5× height or 1,800 ft from dwelling [link]
- Wheeler County, Nebraska, Dec. 9, 2020: 5 mi setback from any dwelling, 1/2 mi distance between turbines, height limit 299 ft [link]
- Piatt County, Illinois, Dec. 9, 2020: 46 dBA noise limit outside of homes [link]
- Ireland, Nov. 24, 2020 [Wind Turbine Regulation Bill reintroduced]: 10× height setback from any dwelling, no shadow flicker at dwelling, noise limits per WHO community noise guidelines [link]
- Reno County, Kansas, Nov. 19, 2020: setback from residence greater of 2,000 ft or 4× height [link]
- Edgar County, Illinois, Nov. 4, 2020: increased setback to 3,250 ft from primary structures [link]
- Piatt County, Illinois, Oct. 22, 2020 [subject to county board approval]: increased setback from greater of 1.1× height or 1,600 ft to nonparticipating structure to greater of 1.3× height or 1,600 ft to nonparticipating property line [link]
- Gage County, Nebraska, Sept. 9, 2020: increased setback to nonparticipating residence from 3/8 mi to 1 mi [link]
- Batavia Township, Michigan, Sept. 1, 2020: height limit 330 ft [link]
- Reno County, Kansas, Aug. 2020 [proposed]: 40-dB annual average noise limit at any principal building (participating property or not) [link]
- Hughes County, South Dakota, Aug. 17, 2020: setback 1/2 mi or 4.9× turbine height from any occupied structure; 45-dB noise limit [link]
- Brown County, Nebraska, May 2020: setback 1 mi from property lines and roads [link]
- North Dakota, Mar. 2020 [subject to Attorney General review and approval of legislative Administrative Rules Committee]: 45 dB noise limit 100 ft from residence [link]
- Fremont County, Iowa, May 2020 [proposed]: setbacks 1,500 ft from participating residence, 2,000 ft from nonparticating residence, 1,000 ft from nonparticipating property line, 1 mi from incorporated cities, 3 mi from Mississippi River [link]
- North Dakota, Mar. 2020 [subject to Attorney General review and approval of legislative Administrative Rules Committee]: 45 dB noise limit 100 ft from residence [link]
- Honolulu (Oahu), Hawaii, Mar. 2020 [subject to full city council approval]: setback 5 mi from nonparticipating property lines [link]
- Matteson Township, Michigan, Mar. 4, 2020: setbacks 1.25 mi from nonparticipating property line, 4× height to any residence; 328-ft height limit; noise limit 45 dB(A) or 55 db(C) at nonparticipating property line; no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property; allowed only in general agricultural, light agricultural, and research industrial zoning districts [link]
- Farmersville, New York, Feb. 10, 2020: height limit 455 ft, setbacks 3,000 ft to property line or well, 2,000 ft to roads, 1 mi to churches and schools including Amish homes and home schools; noise limit lower of 45 dBA at property line and 45 dBA outside dwelling or ambient + 10 dB(A), 10 dB added to nighttime (10pm–7am) levels; noise measurement specified, including C-weighted; shadow flicker on nonparticipating property limited to 8 hours/year and 1 hour/month; property value guarantee and decommissioning provisions [link]
- Seville Township, Michigan, Jan. 13, 2020: 1,640-ft setback from nonparticipating property line [link]
- Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, Jan. 13, 2020: 3 mi from business or residence [link]
- Farmersville and Freedom, New York, Jan. 6, 2020: 2019 law revoked, reverting from 600-ft height limit, 1.3× height setback at property line, and 50-dBA noise limit to 450-ft height limit. Proposed [approved Jan. 30, 2020, by Cattaraugus County Planning Board]: height limit 455 ft, setbacks 3,000 ft to property line, 2,000 ft to roads, 1 mi to churches; noise limit lower of 45 dBA at property line and 45 dBA outside dwelling or ambient + 10 dB(A), 10 dB added to nighttime (10pm–7am) levels; noise measurement specified, including C-weighted; shadow flicker on nonparticipating property limited to 8 hours/year and 1 hour/month; property value guarantee and decommissioning provisions [link]
- Fell Township, Pennsylvania, Jan. 6, 2020: setback 5× total height to property line, minimum 1,500 ft; noise limit at property line 45–55 dB, 42–52 dB 10pm–7am [link]
- Mills County, Iowa, 2019: height limits 80 ft, 150 ft in commercial zones, 200 ft in industrial zones [link]
- North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany, 2019 [subject to public comment]: setback 1.5 km from municipalities; banned from forests [link]
- Ireland, Dec. 12, 2019 [subject to public consultation]: setback 4× total height to residences, minimum 500 m; noise limit (L90,10 min) outside sensitive properties (e.g., residences) lesser of 5 dBA above existing 30–38 dBA background noise or 43 dBA, with penalties for tonal noise and amplitude modulation and a threshold for low-frequency noise; no shadow flicker at sensitive properties [link]
- Sanford, New York, Dec. 10, 2019: setbacks 3× height from all permanent structures and off-site property lines, rights of way, easements, public ways, power lines, gas wells, and state lands, greater of 1,500 ft or 3× height from all off-site schools, hospitals, places of worship, places of public assembly, and residential structures; noise limits at nonparticipating property line of 45 dBA Leq (8-hour), 40 dBA average annual nighttime level, no audible prominent tone, no human-perceptible vibrations, 65 dB Leq at full-octave frequency bands of 16, 31.5, and 63 Hz, and 40 dBA (1-hour) from substation equipment; maximum shadow flicker 30 min/day, 30 h/year [link]
- Sherwood Township, Michigan, Dec. 5, 2019: height limit 330 ft; setbacks 5× height to nonparticipating property, 1 mi from village, 2 mi from environmentally sensitive areas [link]
- Posey County, Indiana, Nov. 25, 2019 [subject to town and County Commission approvals]: noise limit greater of 45 dB or 5 dB over ambient (L₉₀) at nonparticipating property line more than 10% of any hour; no shadow flicker at nonparticipating residence [link]; Jan. 3, 2021: 10 mi distance from Doppler radar site [link]
- Thomas County, Nebraska, Oct. 2021: setback 3 mi from property lines, roads, and wetlands; noise limit 35 dbA at residence [link]
- Hamilton County, Nebraska, Sept. 19, 2021: setback 2 mi from property line [link]
- Portland, New York, Aug. 8, 2020: setbacks 1,600 ft from residences, 1/2 mi from county parks [link]
- Casnovia Township, Michigan, Oct. 2019: setback 4× total height to nonparticipating property line; height limit 500 ft; 39 dBA nighttime noise limit and no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property [link]
- Madison County, Iowa, Aug. 8, 2019: Board of Health recommendation of 1.5 mi setback from nonparticipating property line, 2,100 ft from participating property line, 40 dBA noise limit at property line [link]; Sept. 8, 2019: County Board approves [link]
- Montgomery County, Indiana, June 10, 2019: setbacks greater of 2,640 ft (1/2 mi) or 5× height to property line (Board of Zoning Appeals may increase to 3,200 ft) and 1 mi from towns and schools; 32 dB(A) noise limit at property line; no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property; wells within 1 mi to be tested before and after [link]
- Jasper County, Indiana, May 7, 2019: setbacks greater of 2,640 ft (1/2 mi) or 6.5× height to nonparticipating property lines and 1 mi from nonparticipating existing residences, platted subdivisions, “institutional land uses” (e.g., schools), Iroquois and Kankakee Rivers, and confined feed lots; 35 dB(A) noise limit at nonparticipating property line; no shadow flicker on nonparticipating properties [link]
- Sherwood Township, Michigan, June 13, 2019: height limit 300 ft; setbacks 5× height to property line, 1/2 mi from water, 1 mi from Village of Sherwood, 2 mi from environmentally sensitive areas [link]
- Monitor Township, Michigan, effective Apr. 29, 2019: change of setback from 750 ft to 2,000 ft to nonparticipating or 1,640 ft to participating property line or right-of-way; no shadow flicker or strobe effect on nonparticipating property; no stray voltage; noise limits (Lmax) 45 dBA and 55 dBC at property line or anywhere within neighboring property, no detectable sound pressures of 0.1-20 Hz [link]
- Worth, New York, Apr. 3, 2019: setback 5× height to property lines, structures, and roads; 35 dB(A) noise limit during day, 25 dB(A) at night (7pm–7am) [link]
- Lancaster County, Nebraska, Feb. 19, 2019: change of setback from 1,000 ft to property line to 1 mi to residence (to ensure sound limits established in 2015) [link]
- Kansas, introduced Feb. 12, 2019: HB 2273: setbacks greater of 7,920 ft (1-1/2 mi) or 12× height from residential property lines or public building, greater of 3 mi or 12× height from any airport, wildlife refuge, public hunting area, or public park, and minimum 1,500 ft from any property line [link]
- Nebraska, introduced Jan. 16, 2019 [subject to legislative approval]: LB373: requires hosting counties to have wind ordinances restricting wind turbines within 3 mi of residence without owner’s permission and addressing noise and decommissioning [link]
- Saline County, Nebraska, 2018: setback 1/2 mi from neighboring dwelling; noise limit 40 dBA (10-min average) at any dwelling [link]
- Redfield, New York, Dec. 11, 2018: setback 5× height to property lines, structures, and roads; 35 dB(A) noise limit during day, 25 dB(A) at night (7pm–7am) [link]
- Madison County, Nebraska, Nov. 18, 2024: setbacks of 2,200 ft from nonparticipating dwellings (and no new dwellings within 2,200 ft from wind turbine that can be only 1.1× its height from the property line [link]
- Henry County, Indiana, Nov. 14, 2018: setback 4 mi from town lines: Blountsville, Cadiz, Greensboro, Kennard, Lewisville, Mount Summit, Springport, Straughn, Sulphur Springs, Mooreland [link]
- Richland, New York, Nov. 13, 2018: setback 1 mi from property line; height limit 500 ft; 35 dB(A) (for more than 5 minutes) noise limit at residences [link]
- Adair County, Iowa, Oct. 24, 2018: setback 2,000 ft to nonparticipating home, 800 ft to property line [link]
- Kosciusko County, Indiana, Oct. 16 2018: setback greater of 3,960 ft or 6.5× height to property line, right-of-way, or power line, 1 mi from community or municipality boundary; 32 dB(A) noise limit at property line; no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property; no detectable vibration in nearby structures or that could damage wells; no interference with TV, radio, GPS, etc.; property value guarantees within 2 mi; notification to all within 5 mi [link]
- Adams County, Nebraska, Oct. 2, 2018: setback 2,400 ft to neighboring dwelling, 6,000 ft from turbines not owned by applicant [link]
- Paint Township, Pennsylvania, Aug. 7, 2018: height limit 335 ft; setback 1.5× height to buildings and roads, 2,500 ft to property line [link]
- Greenwood, Maine, Aug. 6, 2018: added height limit of 250 ft; lowered noise limits at nonparticipating property lines from 55 dB during day and 42 dB at night to, respectively, 35 and 25 dB; increased setback to nonparticipating property lines from 1.5× height to 1 mi per 100 ft height [link]
- Dekalb County, Illinois, July 12, 2018 [approved by Board, 19-3, Nov. 21, 2018 (link)]: setback 6× total height to property line, 3 mi to municipality; height limit 500 ft; noise limit of 35 dBA during day (7am–10pm) and 30 dBA at night; no shadow flicker or flash; no radiofrequency or electromagnetic interference [link]
- North Dakota, July 1, 2018: decommission and land reclamation plan, cost estimates, and financial assurance required [link]
- Ingersoll Township, Michigan, May 14, 2018: [link]
- Beaver Township, Michigan, May 14, 2018: setback 4× total height to property line, public roads, and transmission lines; height limit 500 ft; noise limit 45 dBA Lmax or 55 dBC Lmax (or ambient plus 5 dB if greater) at property line [link]
- Shiawassee County, Michigan, May 8, 2018 [subject to County Board of Commissioners approval]: setback 3.5× total height to nonparticipating property line (changed from 1.5×); height limit 450 ft (changed from 600 ft); 45 dB noise limit at property line (changed from 55 dB); no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property (changed from 20 hours/year) [link]
- Almer Township, Michigan, Apr. 2018: setback 4× total height to nonparticipating property line; height limit 500 ft; 45 dBA noise limit at property line; no shadow flicker on nonparticipating property; no stray voltage; decommissioning bond; all concrete to be removed [link]
- Tennessee, Apr. 24, 2018: setback 5× total height to nonparticipating property line; height limit 500 ft [link]
- Miami County, Indiana, Apr. 11, 2018: change of setback from 1,000 ft to 2,000 ft to property line [link]
- DeWitt County, Illinois, Apr. 19, 2018: change of setback from 1,500 ft to 2,000 ft to houses [link]
- Pierce County, Nebraska, Mar. 26, 2018: setback 2,700 ft to houses [link]
- Maroa, Illinois, Mar. 26, 2018: setback 1.5 mi from city border [link]
- Hopkinton, New York, Apr. 26, 2018: setback 5× total height to property line; 40 dBA noise limit at nonparticipating residence [link]
- Burnside Township, Michigan, Feb. 26, 2018: change of sound limit to 45 dBA Lmax (maximum) at property line [link]
- Yates, New York, Feb. 8, 2018: change of setback to nonparticipating property line from 3× height to greater of 6× height or 1/2 mi; greater of 6× height or 1/2 mi to residences, public rights of way, and boundaries with other towns; 1 mi to village boundaries, schools, churches, and cemeteries; 3 mi from Lake Ontario shoreline (per US Fish and Wildlife Service recommendation); change of noise limit from 45 dBA during day (7am–8pm) and 40 dBA at night to 42 dBA during day and 39 dBA at night (per Vermont Public Service Board recommendation) [link]
- Somerset, New York, Jan. 29, 2018: height limit 150 ft; industrial zones only; setback greater of 1/2 mi or 6× height to public roads, property lines, and residences; 3 mi from Lake Ontario shoreline; 42 dBA limit during day (7am–9pm), 35 dBA at night [link]
- Wabash County, Indiana, Dec. 18, 2017: 32 dBA limit outside of primary structures; no vibrations detectable on nonparticipant property; no shadow flicker on nonparticipant property; setbacks 3/4 mi to nonparticipant residential structure, 1/2 to nonparticipant business structure, 3/8 mi to participant residence, greater of 1,000 ft or 2× height to public roads [link]
- Rochester, Indiana, Dec. 4, 2017: setback 3 mi from city limits [link]
- Vermont, Nov. 22, 2017: 42 dBA limit 95% of the time 100 ft to nonparticipating residence during day (7am–9pm), 39 dBA at night (9pm–7am; goal to achieve interior sound level of ≤30 dB) [link]
- Stanton County, Nebraska, Nov. 2017: setback 2,700 ft from nonparticipating residence [link]
- Dixfield, Maine, Nov. 7, 2017: setbacks 2,000 ft to property line, 4,000 ft to occupied building or scenic or special resource; sound limits at property line of 42 dBA at night (7–7), 55 dBA at day within 4,000 ft; 5 dBA added to any average 10-minute sound level in which a tonal sound occurs, 5 dBA added to any average 10-minute sound level in which ≥5 short-duration repetitive sounds occur [link]
- Clark County, South Dakota, Aug. 14, 2017 [subject to appeal ruling]: change of setback from 1,000 ft to 3,960 ft (3/4 mi) to residences [link]
- Antelope County, Nebraska [subject to county commission approval]: change of setback from 2,000 ft to 2,700 ft to nonparticipating residence; maximum of 2 turbines within 4,000 ft of nonparticipating residence [link]
- Parishville, New York, June 22, 2017: setback 5× total height to property line; 45 dBA noise limit at nonparticipating residence during day (7am–7pm), 35 dBA at night (7pm–7am) [link]
- Bethel, Maine, June 14, 2017: setback 2 mi to property line; 25 dBA limit at property line 7pm–7am, 35 dBA 7am–7pm; height limit 250 ft [link]
- Walworth County, South Dakota, May 10, 2017: setback 2 mi to off-site residence, business, or church [link]
- Lincoln County, South Dakota, May 2, 2017 [upheld by referendum, July 18, 2017 (link)]: setback 1/2 mi to homes; 45 dB limit at property line; shadow flicker limits [link]
- North Dakota, June 5, 2017: aircraft detection required to minimize lighting at night [link]
- Clayton County, New York, Apr. 26, 2017: own use only; setback 5.5× height to property line [link]
- Livingston County, Illinois, Apr. 20, 2017: setback to participating homes changed from 1,200 ft to greater of 3,250 ft or 6× height; setback to property line 1,640 ft; state Pollution Control Board noise limits measured at residential property line [link]
- County Westmeath, Ireland, Jan. 31, 2017: setbacks from homes 500 m for heights >25 m to 50 m, 1,000 m for heights >50 m to 100 m, 1,500 m for heights >100 m to 150 m, and >2 km for heights ≥150 m [link]
- Rush County, Indiana, Dec. 16, 2016: project approved with setback 2,640 ft to nonparticipating property lines and height limit 200 ft; 32 dB limit at propertly line; no shadow flicker on neighboring property [link]
- Wayne County, Indiana, Dec. 7, 2016: zoning variance required for every turbine; large turbines not permitted: >100 ft tall, >50 kW, blade sweep >30 ft [link]
- Hagerstown, Indiana, Nov. 22, 2016: no structures over 100 ft height within 2 mi of town (extension of airport regulation) [link]
- Sand Beach Township, Michigan, Oct. 2016 [approved by referendum, 413-80, May 2, 2017 (link)]: 40 dB limit at hosting residences during day, 35 dB at night; 35 dB and 30 dB for nonhosting residences [link]
- Wabash County, Indiana, Oct. 17, 2016: 32 dBA limit outside of primary structures; shadow flicker at residential and business structures limited to 15 minutes per day, 4 days per year; setback 1/2 mi to nonparticipating residential or business structure [link]
- Clayton County, New York, Sept. 27, 2016: setback 1 mi to any structure, roadway, or property line; developers required to pay property owners for any damages or decreases in property value [link]
- Palo Alto County, Iowa, Sept. 27, 2016: setback 1,500 ft to dwellings and cemeteries [link]
- L’Anse Township, Michigan, Aug. 10, 2016: setback to nonparticipating property line (without easement) changed from 1,000 ft to 2,540 ft; height limit 500 ft [link]
- County Laois, Ireland, Aug. 5, 2016 [augmented Mar. 29, 2017, by total ban (link)]: setback 1.5 km to schools, dwellings, community centers, and public roads [link]
- Newfield, New York, July 24, 2016: setback 1,760 ft or 3× blade radius to property line without lease or easement [link]
- Tipton County, Indiana, July 2016: setbacks 2,640 ft from residences, 1,500 ft from property lines [link]
- Letcher Township, South Dakota, June 8, 2016; effective July 1, 2016: setbacks 1 mi to nonparticipating residence and 1,500 ft to property line [link]
- Poland, May 2016 (revoked to 700 m setback Mar. 2023): setback 10× total height of turbine to housing [link]
- Gage County, Nebraska, Mar. 30, 2016: 45 dB limit at nonparticipating properties during day, 40 dB at night (10pm–7am); setback 3/8 mi to nonparticipating residence [link]
- New Hampshire, Dec. 15, 2015: sound limits: greater of 45 dBAL90 or 5 dBA above background level during day (8–8), 40 dBA during day, greater of 40 dBAL90 or 5 dBA above background level at night at any temporary or permanent residence; shadow flicker: no more than 8 hours per year at or in any residence, learning space, workplace, health care setting, outdoor or indoor public gathering area, or other occupied building [link]
- Freedom, Maine, Nov. 17, 2015: 13× height setback to property line, 4× height to public roads, 2,500 ft to special resources; sound limits 5 dBA above preconstruction ambient level, 40 dBA during day, and 35 dBA at night at property line, and 20 dBC above preconstruction ambient dBA level at property line and inside dwellings [link]
- Lancaster County, Nebraska, Nov. 10, 2015: sound limits at exterior wall of dwellings 40 dBA and 3 dBA above background (by 10-minute average, Leq,10min) from 7am to 10pm, 37 dBA from 10pm to 7am [link]
- Boone County, Illinois, Nov. 4, 2015: change of setback from 1,000 ft to 2,640 ft (1/2 mi) to property line [link]
- Emmet County, Michigan, Oct. 15, 2015: change of setback from 1,000 ft to 2,640 ft (1/2 mi) to property line [link]
- Oklahoma, Aug. 21, 2015: set back 1.5 mi from public school, hospital, or airport [link]
- Catlin, New York, July 9, 2015: height limit 400 ft;, noise limit 40 dBA at property line [link]
- Rush County, Indiana, July 1, 2015 (upheld by trial court May 27, 2016, appeals court Feb. 14, 2017, and supreme court May 25, 2017 [link]): project approved with change of setback to 2,300 ft to residences and property line [link]
- Peru, Massachusetts, June 6, 2015: height limit [link]
- Garden Township, Michigan, June 1, 2015: 35 dBA or 50 dBC limit at property line from 10pm to 6am [link]
- Iroquois County, Illinois, Apr. 14, 2015: change of setback to property line from 1,500 ft to 12 rotor diameters [link]
- Cleburne County, Alabama, Feb. 9, 2015 [needs state approval]: 2,500 ft setback to property line, 40 dB sound limit [link]
- Howard County, Indiana, Jan. 5, 2015: change of setback from 1,500 ft to 2,000 ft from property line and noise limit at neighboring residence from 50 dBA to 40 dBA [link]
- Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Jan. 5, 2015: 1,000 m setback, 600 m with consent of homeowner [link]
- Bavaria, Germany, Nov. 21, 2014: 10× height setback to homes, 800 m to other dwellings [link]
- Adams Township, Michigan, Oct. 2014, affirmed Apr. 13, 2015 [link]: 3,000 ft setback to lines, roads, and homes [link]
- Plympton-Wyoming, Ontario, Oct. 8, 2014; repealed under threat of lawsuit May 27, 2015 [link]: 50 dB average, +10 dB peak infrasound limit inside dwellings; 15 dBC or 20 dB infrasound limit over dBA level inside or outside dwellings; amplitude modulation limit indoors of 2 mPa RMS for 10 seconds out of any 40 seconds [link]
- Mason County, Kentucky, Sept. 30, 2014: wind turbines >50 kW in already-designated industrial zones only; 1 mi setback of turbines, substations, and maintenance/operation facilities to property line, residences/regularly used buildings, residential zones, rights of way, wetlands, etc.; 30 dBA and 50 dbC limits at property line [link]
- Buckland, Massachusetts, Sept. 25, 2014: limits of 250 kW capacity and 120 ft height, setbacks 360 ft to property line and half-mile to off-site residence [link]
- County Offaly, Ireland, Sept. 15, 2014: setback 2 km from towns and villages [link]
- Fairview Township, Pennsylvania, Aug. 4, 2014: height limit 350 ft, setbacks 1,500 ft to property lines and bodies of water, 1.1× height to roads [link]
- Dallas County, Iowa, July 29, 2014: setbacks 2,640 ft from residence, school, hospital, church, or public library, 2 mi from sensitive natural resource areas, wildlife management areas, prairies, wetlands, forested areas, etc.; 30 dBA noise limit at property line of any dwelling, school, hospital, church, or public library [link]
- County Donegal, Ireland, June 30, 2014 [cancelled by Minister Oct. 6, 2016; reinstated Mar. 27, 2017]: setback 10× tip height to places of residence or public assembly [link]
- Ohio, June 16, 2014: change of setback (1,125 ft from blade tip) to property line (from house) [link]
- Schoolcraft County, Michigan, June 5, 2014: setbacks 3,960 ft (3/4-mi) to dwellings and businesses, 1 mi to scenic areas, parks, highways; 35 dB(A) limit at property line, ambient plus 5 dB limit at dwellings [link]
- Etowah County, Alabama, Mar. 19, 2014: 40 dB limit at property line, 2,500 ft setback from property line [link]
- Cherokee County, Alabama, Mar. 18, 2014: 40 dB limit at property line, 2,500 ft setback from property line [link]
- DeKalb County, Alabama: 40 dB limit at property line, 2,500 ft setback from property line [link]
- Granville, Pennsylvania, May 5, 2014: setbacks 2,000 ft to property line and participating residence and 2,500 ft to nonparticipating residence, 45 dBA or 45 dBC limit at property line [link]
- Carteret County, North Carolina, Feb. 26, 2014: change of setback to 1 mi (from 6× height), plus 275 ft height limit and 35 dB limit (for more than 5 min) at property line [link]
- Iredell County, North Carolina: 350 ft height limit, 30 dB noise limit at property line [link]
- Ashe County, North Carolina: 199 ft height limit [link]
- County Offaly, Ireland, Sept. 15, 2014: setback 2 km from towns and villages [link]
- Kentucky, 2014: setbacks 1,000 ft from property lines, 2,000 ft from residential neighborhood, school, hospital, or nursing home facility [link]
- Eastern Kings, Prince Edward Island, 2013: setbacks 4× height to participating dwelling, 3,280 ft (1,000 m) to nonparticipating dwelling [link]
- Saxony, Germany, July 12, 2013: setback 1,000 m to residence [link]
- Noble County, Indiana, May 2013: 3/4 mi to residence [link]
- Whitley County, Indiana, May 2013: greater of 1/2 mi or 6.5× height to residence [link]
- Woodstock, Maine, Mar. 25, 2013: setback 1 mi to property line; 35 dBA limit at property line 7pm–7am, 45 dBA 7am–7pm [link]
- Crook County, Wyoming, June 6, 2012: setbacks greater of 5× height or 1 mi from residence, 1/2 mi from city or town [link]
- Pratt County, Kansas, May 12, 2012: 3,960 ft to residence [link]
- Wisconsin, Mar. 15, 2012: 1.1× height to property line, 1,250 ft to any residence [link]
- Bingham County, Idaho, 2012: 3× height to property line, 1 mi platted Town sites and cities [link]
- Haut-Saint-Laurent, Montérégie, Québéc, Jan. 9, 2013: 2 km setback [link]
- Denmark, Dec. 15, 2011: addition of 20 dB low-frequency (10–160 Hz) limit (day and night) inside homes [link]
- Frankfort, Maine, Dec. 1, 2011: 1 mi setback to property line, noise limits within 2 mi 35 dB day, 25 dB night [link] [repeal rejected Nov. 4, 2014; link]
- Victoria, Australia, Aug. 29, 2011: 2 km setback without consent of homeowner [link]; reduced to 1 km Mar. 2015 [link]
- Umatilla County, Oregon, June 28, 2011: change of setback to 2 mi from “urban grown boundary”, 1 mi from "unincorporated community" zones (from 3,520 ft) [link]
- Barnstable County (Cape Cod), Massachusetts, Apr. 20, 2011: 10× rotor diameter to property line [link]
- Centerville Township, Michigan, Aug. 18, 2010: height limit 199 ft; setback 10× rotor diameter to property line or road; noise limits at property line 35 dBA or 5 dBA above background during day, 3 dBA above background at night, with low-frequency limits and tonality penalty [link]
- Klickitat County, Washington, Aug. 17, 2010: setback 1,600 ft to residences [link]
- Allegany County, Maryland, Jan. 1, 2010: setbacks 2,000 ft to homes, 5,000 ft to schools [link]
- Dixmont, Maine, 2009: setback 2,500 ft from neighboring residential property line [link]
- Kearny County, Kansas, 2009: setback 2,000 ft from property line [link]
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