Over at Boing Boing, there is an interesting article about wind power and the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome. The article suggests that the general understanding of the NIMBY syndrome is wrong, and the problem is not that people locally oppose what they support in a general sense. Rather, people who oppose wind farm on principle become energetic opponents when the prospect of it being installed locally arises. I am not sure how convincing I find the analysis, but the issue is an important one and not only for wind. Whatever our post-fossil fuel energy mix is going to consist of, it is going to require facilities being built near where people live, whether those facilities are concentrating solar plants, dams, wind farms, carbon capture and storage facilities, nuclear reactors, or something else.
The same issue was discussed in the film The Age of Stupid. There, it seemed pretty clear that the primary objection people had was local wind farms depressing property values. The Boing Boing article does discuss one partial solution there: offering the locals a share of the revenues from the project might change their thinking.
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Well, their account of the NIMBY phenomenon sounds wrong to me. The NIMBY issue affecting my home neighbourhood in the UK is definitely a case of people opposing locally (expansion of freight train use) what they agree with on a national level. Pretty much everyone involved there agrees that it’s good to get freight off the road and onto railways, they just don’t think the local road infrastructure can handle a freight depot, or that it is appropriate to build a major development in the green belt, or that the extra noise all night is acceptable, or that the disruption to the commuter trains (which is almost inevitable since the freight trains will use the same lines and tend to require a lot more maintenance due to being heavier) is ok. So in short, if these people are trying to generalize their claim about the NIMBY phenomenon from a study of windfarms then I’d say that they are totally full of shit.
It’s not entirely insane to internalize the property value depression as a cost for the project. As much as I hate property, it’s probably the best “art of the political” solution here.
My parent live on Frenchmen’s bay, in Lake Ontario, which while lovely, is also right next to the Pickering Nuclear station (they need big water sources, so are on lakes). The station also has an experimental wind turbine (my dad calls it a giant lawn ornament). Once while jogging I saw someone recording the wind turbine to aid in protesting a wind farm being built in his town (I forget which proposed wind farm it was) … I yelled at the man. I mean we live next to a NUCLEAR POWER PLANT and he can’t handle a warm farm. We need power, so we need wind farms and nuclear power stations deal with it.
I’ve never understood quite what problem people have with wind farms. They’re silent (right?), useful, and incredibly graceful-looking structures. I’d be happy to have such a view from my window, though I realise that’s unlikely to happen here in south London.
Some objections were described in the comments here: Grouse Mountain’s 1.5MW wind turbine
I find this topic particularly interesting. In fact, I even once contemplated writing my PhD thesis on protests against windmills and windfarms.
I think it should be clear that the NIMBY phenomena is not about the activity itself, its about its location. Windmills are not as benign as some makes them to be. Certain types are actually quite noisy (think low frequency repetitive noise). Others would simply be out of place in a particular landscape. In a few decades, older wind turbines might even look ugly even to the most up-beat wind energy promoters of today.
Finding the best place to deploy this otherwise critical infrastructure is not easy.
The planning takeover
The nuclear option
Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition
A shake-up in planning could centralise power and weaken the say of local people
BRITAIN, and especially England, is occasionally compared to North Korea (only half-jokingly) as one of the most heavily centralised states in the world. Whitehall bureaucrats micromanage schools and hospitals; local government is dependent on the Treasury for most of its funding. But one bastion of local power has for years stood apart from the trend towards central control: planning, the process by which building projects are granted or denied permission to proceed. Objections from stubborn locals can derail or delay everything from small wind farms and shopping centres to huge projects of national importance. The most notorious example is probably Heathrow airport’s fifth terminal, which languished in the planning system for year upon year before eventually being approved in 2001.
On November 9th all that seemed set to change, as Ed Miliband, the energy and climate-change secretary, delivered the first of the government’s “National Policy Statements” on infrastructure. These will inform the work of the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), an independent body set up last month. Led by Sir Michael Pitt, a veteran planner and local-authority boss, it will take over responsibility for planning nationally important projects from March 2010. Decisions that used to take years will, in theory, take just months or even weeks, with public involvement drastically curtailed.
Do wind turbines hurt property values?
By Dianne Saxe on wind turbine
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released a report: “The Impact of Wind Power Projects on Residential Property Values in the United States: A Multi-Site Hedonic Analysis”, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The researchers collected data on almost 7,500 sales of single-family homes within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine U.S. states, between 1996 and 2007; the closest home was 800 feet from a wind facility. The conclusions of the study are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, as well as both repeat sales and sales volume models. A hedonic model is a statistical analysis method used to estimate the impact of house characteristics on sales prices.
None of the models uncovered conclusive evidence of widespread property value effects in communities surrounding wind energy facilities. Neither the view of the wind facilities nor the distance of homes to those facilities had a consistent, measurable, and significant effect on home selling prices. While individual homes or small numbers of homes may have been negatively impacted, such impacts were either too small and/or too infrequent to result in a statistically observable effect.
Finding the best place to deploy this otherwise critical infrastructure is not easy.
Especially at the necessary scale.
In his hypothetical renewable energy plan for the UK, David MacKay calls for a lot of wind: 52 onshore wind farms (5200 km^2) and 29 offshore wind farms (2900 km^2).
Even that quantity doesn’t come close to providing the level of energy used by the UK now. Even to provide a reduced amount, to provide the same services with more efficiency, you also need a heap of other energy sources including nuclear stations and coal stations with carbon capture.
“Do wind turbines hurt property values?”
Does anyone else find it strange this question even gets asked? What will the “property values” be if we don’t mitigate climate change?
We need to dismiss the idea that saving the world can be non-violent. All the solutions, be it wind farms, hydro dams, nuclear stations, coal mining for CO2 capture plants, are all horribly naturally devastating. Dams destroy river ecology, mines all have toxic tailing piles, and wind farms kill birds.
But we’re not trying to “save nature” – we’re trying to save ourselves. We don’t need every river to be healthy, we don’t need every bird migration. What we do need is no run-away climate change.