Do Clean Green Wind Farms Cause Noise Pollution?

Did you ever see a wind farm on a drive out by the countryside and think to yourself,”How wonderful it would be to have something so quiet and green in my backyard”? If you ever did see a wind farm, chances are that you didn’t choose to use the word “quiet” in that sentence. As more and more communities across the country that opted for wind farms are seeing, those graceful wind energy propellers bear more in resemblance to a helicopter then just those slender blades. The whooshing and thumping of a wind turbine can be disturbingly reminiscent of the sound of a helicopter. To green energy enthusiasts, it can often come as a shock how loud being green can be.

Once communities bring in windfarms with a great deal of petitioning, and at no small cost for the benefits to their environments that they believe it can bring, in some cases there are class-action lawsuits filed after property value has been lost over the sheer amount of noise and vibration that a set of blades can produce. There have been lawsuits all over the place was constant, Texas, Massachusetts, you name it. Usually, the lawsuits are dismissed. Judges usually want to know how having polluting coal-fired power generation stations and the neighborhood could possibly be better than a little annoying noise. Green energy enthusiasts are quickly being converted anti-wind though.

The wind turbine industry has had vociferous critics for a long time about the way they ruin idyllic landscapes. They have also had what is considered the nut fringe claiming thaat the living close to windfarms causes blurred vision and heart problems, all coming from the ultra-low frequency vibrations from the turbines. While the claims are indeed correct that there are frequencies emitted in the sub sonic range by the slow whir and wallop of the blades, there is little scientific reason to believe that they cause any health problems. The American Wind Energy Association has independent scientific opinion on its side to this effect.

There are more than 200 new windfarms that have come onstream over the last couple years in this country. Only a handful have managed to rile their neighbors enough to cause any kind of large-scale complaints or lawsuits. Some of the objectors do manage to collect enough data to prove that the general noise pollution limits imposed in their state are exceeded sometimes. To put things in perspective, the amount of noise that an average conversation can generate is about 55 dB. In most states, noise levels generated are not allowed to be greater than 45 dB. Do those blades actually generate that much noise? If you ever saw them, those blades are a hundred feet long each. As they cut through the air, you had better believe any noise claims you hear.

In lawsuits filed in Europe, they’ve ordered windmills turned off at night so that people can get some sleep. But people have noise issues in lots of places in modern life. If you lived anywhere near the railroad tracks, if you ever lived near a river that boats went on, if you live near a school with noisy children, you would know better than to complain about noise from clean green energy.