Downside of Wind Power: Noise, Shadows, Family Fights

Even the elegant and stately wind turbine is not a perfect solution for our energy needs. Wind power may be clean and locally grown, but plunk a turbine down in the middle of a community, and you may still decrease the quality of life and spark division among family and friends. Consider the impact of the 400-million-dollar, 195-turbine Maple Ridge project on the Tug Hill Plateau in northern New York State:

[Electrician John Yancey] knows the futuristic towers are pumping clean electricity into the grid, knows they have been largely embraced by his community.

But Yancey hates them.

He hates the sight and he hates the sound. He says they disrupt his sleep, invade his house, his consciousness. He can't stand the gigantic flickering shadows the blades cast at certain points in the day.

But what this brawny 48-year-old farmer's son hates most about the windmills is that his father, who owns much of the property, signed a deal with the wind company to allow seven turbines on Yancey land.

"I was sold out by my own father," he sputters [Helen O'Neill, "Windmills Split Towns and Families," AP via Yahoo News, 2008.08.16].

The tension is understandable: Yancey's father Ed and other landowners get a minimum of $6,600 for each turbine they permit on their land. $6,600 is pretty good money for doing nothing but allowing some engineers on your land. The wind power company also signed deals with neighboring landowners to pay $500 to $1000 as compensation for the nuisance of the wind turbines. That's good money... but then what price do you put on getting a good night's sleep in your own house?

The wind turbines aren't causing cancer. They aren't spilling chemicals into the air or ground water. They aren't requiring a military presence in the Persian Gulf.

But as the neighbors in O'Neill's article point out, the turbines do make noise. (Then again, John Yancey's brother Gordon, who also laments the windmills' proximity, runs an inn that hosts snowmobile races and helicopter rides—not exactly a serene, whispering business.) They cast those flickering shadows, something you might not notice until a couple months later, as the sun wheels with the seasons and suddenly you find a flickering light in your window distracting you all morning or all evening. They disrupt radio and TV reception.

There are always externalities. Even clean technology like wind and solar will impose costs on the communities that deploy them. Figuring out just compensation for our neighbors' lost sleep and scenery won't be easy... but it can't be any harder than maintaining an imperial army to maintain our supply lines to foreign energy.