Scratch another complaint about wind off the list
AWEA has been busy this past year knocking down pseudo reports about the supposed problems caused by wind energy projects. At last, some good news. A new report released today by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that proximity to wind energy facilities "does not have a pervasive or widespread adverse effect on the property values of nearby homes."
The study examined 7,500 home sales near wind farms, which the Laboratory called "the most comprehensive and data-rich analysis to date on the potential impact of U.S. wind projects on residential property values."
“Neither the view of wind energy facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes,” says report author Ben Hoen, a consultant to Berkeley Lab. “No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back – no evidence of widespread impacts.”
According to the report, "The analysis revealed that home sales prices are very sensitive to the overall quality of the scenic vista from a property, but that a view of a wind energy facility did not demonstrably impact sales prices." In other words, turbines are scenic? We knew that.
