It’s only when you dig beneath the surface of the official lies and cover ups that you realise just how filthy and all-pervasive the wind farm scam is. Why are so few journalists investigating it? Why isn’t it on the front pages every day? Are we really so cynical and decadent that we no longer expect our trade bodies, our institutions, our government departments to behave with a shred of decency?
—James Delingpole

Editor’s note: We would like to dedicate the article, below, to Derek (“I tell the truth”) Maitland—an Australian journalist who seems impervious to evidence.

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—James Delingpole, The Telegraph (UK), 9/19/12

And there’s no direct evidence that they affect house prices, in fact the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors says they don’t.”

This is a quote—a genuine quote: not one devised by his enemies to satirise the outrageous absurdity of the wind industry’s specious claims—from Maf Smith, Deputy Chief of the wind industry propaganda arm RenewableUK.
I suppose how far it qualifies as a lie depends on how you construe that weasel phrase “direct evidence.” Evidence of one kind or another there certainly is aplenty. Here, for example, is a sad letter I received from a gentleman in Northamptonshire. (I’ve redacted some details because he doesn’t want his case jeopardised.)

The Farmer that owns the land adjacent to my property decided about four years ago to host a wind-farm. Despite the support of the local planning officer, the District Council turned down the application unanimously, with one abstention. The Parish Council had also voted against it. Inevitably, the developer launched an Appeal, which was heard last October/November by The Planning Inspectorate. The Planning Inspector, of course, supported the developer and granted his consent to the application.
This is, as you will well know, the usual pattern. Around 85% of appeal hearings are granted consent by PINS. The turbines are very near (within 500 metres of) six dwellings, two of which are owned by the farmer and his son. My home is one of those within the 500 metre range.
Following the Inspector’s decision, I contacted a local firm of Estate Agents to obtain a valuation of my house before the development took place, plus a surveyor’s estimate of what the value would be once the wind-farm was built. The difference between the two estimates was £100,000 (about 25% of their estimated value of the property).
Armed with this information, I embarked on a correspondence with both The Planning Inspectorate (PINS) and The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The purpose of my correspondence was to enquire to whom I should apply for compensation for this loss in value to my home. This was a somewhat acrimonious correspondence, in the course of which DECC claimed that a report issued by the Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 2007 clearly stated that there was no evidence of any devaluation in the value of properties adjoining wind-farms.

There’s not an estate agent dealing with rural properties anywhere in the land that isn’t aware of the issue. “The majority of homebuyers don’t want to live anywhere near a wind farm—it’s as simple as that,” one tells me. And if they don’t broadcast the fact too loudly, he says, it’s for two reasons: first they want to get the highest possible price for their sellers; second because often these same rural agents represent landowners who are making money out of wind farms and they don’t want to upset their clients.
Then of course there was this recent report by the Valuation Office Agency:

The decisions by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to move certain houses close to wind farms into lower council tax bands are the first official recognition that the turbines can lower the value of nearby homes.

Although property experts have long acknowledged the harmful effect of wind farms on property prices, the association has until now been dismissed by the wind industry as conjecture.

In one recent case a couple saw the value of their home 650 yards from the Fullabrook wind farm near Braunton, Devon, fall from £400,000 to £300,000 according to a local agent’s estimate.

The couple, who were not attempting to sell their house, told the VOA that the persistent whooshing noise caused by the turbines and the visual intrusion—including a flickering shadow when the sun is directly behind the blades—made their property less valuable.

The VOA accepted their argument and agreed to move the property from council tax band F to band E, amounting to a saving of about £400 a year, the Sunday Times reported.

But this was hardly news to anyone in touch with reality. The blighting effect of wind farms on property prices has been known in Britain since at least 2008 thanks the well-publicised Jane Davis case.

In a landmark case, Jane Davis was told she will get a discount on her council tax because her £170,000 home had been rendered worthless by a turbine 1,000 yards away.
The ruling is effectively an official admission that wind farms, which are accused of spoiling countryside views and producing a deafening roar, have a negative effect on house prices.

In some countries—Denmark, for example—this blighting effect is officially acknowledged, with victims receiving compensation for loss of value caused to their properties by adjacent wind farms.
For copious further evidence that wind farms damage property values, look here.
You might have hoped that this glaringly obvious, frankly indisputable fact would have been acknowledged by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the body which represents and regulates British estate agents. Instead, in 2007, the RICS commissioned the report which has been cited by both RenewableUK and the Department of Energy and Climate Change as “evidence” that wind farms do not damage property prices.
In fact the report says no such thing. But then it probably wasn’t designed that way. What it is, in fact, is a cowardly and disingenuous exercise in fence-sitting. It was commissioned from two researchers at Oxford Brookes University (that’ll be Oxford Poly in old money), one of them an expert in “sustainable development.” About half the short study is mysteriously dedicated to explaining why wind energy is popular and necessary (“the activities of man are responsible for the changes in climate that we are seeing” runs one, pull-out quote). When finally it gets round to trying to answer the question it was set, the report is inconclusive. Yes, there is evidence that the “threat” of a wind farm may have a “significant” impact on property prices. But perhaps, it suggests—though without any evidence—the opposite may also sometimes be true “if the community are actively involved in the process and enjoy some of the benefits through lower, greener, fuel costs.”
However, buried in this slippery and evasive report—in my view a disgrace to the integrity of the RICS—was one killer detail which makes an absolute nonsense of RenewableUK’s claim at the beginning of this post.

Terraced houses sited within 1 mile of a wind farm were observed to be 54 per cent lower in value and semi detached houses within 1 mile of the nearest turbine were 35 per cent lower than similar houses at a distance of four miles.”

Does that sound to you like “no direct evidence” that wind farms “affect property prices”? Thought not.
When I rang the RICS to point out how Maf Smith was representing their 2007 report, a spokesman said: “Well he’s talking nonsense.” However, when I asked whether they were then going to complain about his mispresentation of their position, they said that this was an issue for RenewableUK not for the RICS.
Well can I understand why the RICS might be uncomfortable with this issue. Though not as culpable as RenewableUK on this score their official position on the effect of wind farms on property values is at best misleading, at worst outright dishonest. Wind farms DO deleteriously affect property prices. Full stop. It’s a grotesque cop-out to say, as they do on their website, that “There is no definitive answer to this question.” It’s a lawyerly evasion worth of “Slick Willy” Clinton—not a fair representation of the facts on the ground.
What’s even more despicable, though, is the way that RICS’s jelly-like non-position on this vital issue has been cynically and ruthlessly exploited by the wind lobby. We’ve seen above, how RenewableUK have twisted that cop-out RICS report. Here’s how it has been similarly exploited by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which claims on its website:

There can be concerns from homeowners that the value of their property might be affected by the presence of a wind farm. A report published in March 2007 by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and Oxford Brookes University found that house price fluctuations were more likely to be caused by factors other than wind farms despite initial evidence there was an effect. More information is available on a Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors: Frequently Asked Questions.

This the real scandal of the wind farm scam: the way apparently respectable, official bodies are effectively colluding to hide the true facts from a trusting public. In Britain, by tradition, we are used to taking the various branches of the Establishment at their word. If something called the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors tells us that wind farms do not necessarily affect property prices then we may well believe them; if a government department like DECC doctors this claim on its official website, then we’re probably mainly inclined to trust them too; if a trade body like RenewableUK twists that claim by a further degree well, God help us, we’re probably inclined to take them at their word too—because, hey, isn’t there some kind of law requiring these people to tell the truth?
It’s only when you dig beneath the surface of the official lies and cover ups that you realise just how filthy and all-pervasive the wind farm scam is. Why are so few journalists investigating it? Why isn’t it on the front pages every day? Are we really so cynical and decadent that we no longer expect our trade bodies, our institutions, our government departments to behave with a shred of decency?

The entire ancient earth thinks prodigiously,
and the murmur of its great trees grows”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

It was Leopold who spoke reverently of watching the green fire go out of the eyes of a wolf he shot in his callous youth—vowing never to do so again. If you have never read his Sand County Almanac—you must. It’s a life changer.

He died in 1948, the year I was born, overcome by smoke while fighting a brush fire near his beloved Wisconsin wilderness camp.

The article, below, was sent to me by Boyce Sherwin, a friend and neighbor in my neck of the woods. The article says nothing about wind turbines—not explicitly, that is. Implicitly, it says volumes. For those of you living in rural Ontario, rural France or Italy or England or Australia, rural Maine, or wherever turbines and their headache-pounding infrasound and banshee roar have commandeered your soundscape, you will grieve for the lost symphony of quietness, where “peace comes dropping slow.”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core
—Wm. Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892)

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“Aldo Leopold’s Field Notes Score a Lost ‘Soundscape’”

—Terry Devitt, reprinted in ScienceDaily (9/18/12)
Among his many qualities, the pioneering wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold was a meticulous taker of field notes. Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, Leopold routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down in tidy script the bird songs he heard, when he heard them, and details such as the light level when they first sang. He also mapped the territories of the birds near his shack, so he knew where the songs originated.
Lacking a tape recorder, the detailed written record was the best the iconic naturalist could do.
“Leopold took amazing field notes,” says Stan Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of wildlife ecology and now a senior fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “He recorded his observations of nature in great detail.”
Using those notes, Temple and Christopher Bocast, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute graduate student and acoustic ecologist, have recreated a “soundscape” from Leopold’s 70 year-old notes. But the dawn chorus that Leopold heard in1940 no longer exists at the shack, Temple explains. The mix of species today is different due to changes in the landscape and changes in the bird community around the shack.
More noticeable is the thrum of the nearby interstate highway, audible at every hour from Leopold’s storied sanctuary, and the other constant and varied noises of the human animal. Since Leopold’s time, for example, the internal combustion engine has roared to soundscape dominance, whether as an airplane overhead, a rumbling motorcycle, a whining chain saw or an outboard churning on the nearby Wisconsin River.
“The difference between 1940 and 2012 is overwhelmingly the anthrophony — human-generated noise,” explains Temple. “That’s the big change. In Leopold’s day there was much less of that.”
The resurrected soundscape of 1940s Sauk County is the first to be recreated from actual data rather than someone’s imagination of what the past sounded like, says Temple. The work fits into an emerging field of science known as soundscape ecology, which seeks to explain the role of sound within a landscape and how it influences the animals — birds, insects, amphibians, even fish — that live there.
Recently, a rarefied group of scholars who work in the new field met at the Leopold Center, just a few hundred yards from Leopold’s humble shack. The National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop drew not only scientists but philosophers, musicians and others with an interest in natural sounds. Temple gave the opening keynote, which featured the reconstructed dawn chorus.
“Aldo Leopold recognized that you can get a pretty good sense of land health by listening to the soundscape,” Temple says. “If sounds are missing and things are there that shouldn’t be, it often indicates underlying ecological problems.”
The soundscape produced by Temple and Bocast is a compressed version of the chorus described by Leopold, taking 30 minutes of notes and compressing them into five minutes of recording. Bird songs and calls were obtained from the extensive collection housed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library.
The background sound on which they superimposed the bird songs is all Wisconsin, but Temple and Bocast struggled to find a place where human noise was as it would have been in Leopold’s time: “There are combustion engines on the edge of hearing all the time,” says Bocast, whose dissertation work includes a bioacoustic study low frequency sounds made by spawning sturgeon.
Citing a recent study, Temple points out that in the lower 48 states, there is no place more than 35 kilometers from the nearest road, making it nearly impossible to tune out the hum of human activity, even in places designated as wilderness. “It is increasingly difficult to study natural soundscapes that represent normality,” says Temple, noting that its not just mechanical human noise that’s encroaching. The rain forests of Hawaii, for example, no longer sound like the rain forests of Hawaii. “They sound more like the rain forests of Puerto Rico because the calls of an introduced, invasive tree frog are becoming pervasive.”
Preserving the natural sounds of a place, avers Temple, may be just as challenging as conserving the mosaic of plants and animals that help keep an ecosystem intact. Like smell and sight, “sound can be what you associate with a particular landscape,” something Leopold appreciated and wrote about in several of his well known essays.
By noting and studying the role of sound in the natural world, Leopold proved again to be ahead of his time. Science is only now coming to grips with the totality of the sounds of nature (much like the sound of an entire orchestra) rather than the individual components of the soundscape, according to Temple.
Understanding how nature’s “music” is changing and how much attention we need to pay to the sounds introduced by people, he says, are challenges for soundscape ecologists. And we have much to learn about what the noise people make does to the environment.

The American Bird Conservancy reported on October 28, 2011 that almost 500 birds were “reportedly killed after lights were left on at an electrical substation.”  That report was confirmed when Stantec Consulting Services Inc. reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that 8, 250-watt high pressure sodium lamps were left on at the Battery Energy Storage System at the Leadsville substation, part of the AES Laurel Mountain wind facility.

Read more…

Town officials said they are making the decision because solar energy produces greater financial rewards and also because of a regulatory restriction that limits how much electricity a municipality can sell a utility.

David G. Cressman, the town’s executive administrator, said between the town’s solar projects at Energy Park off Old Fall River Road and at the former landfill, Dartmouth will generate 9.67 megawatts of electricity.

He said state law limits municipal net metering to 10 megawatts and the turbines would put Dartmouth over that limit.

Select Board Chairman Michael P. Watson said the town will realize $13.3 million over 20 years from the two solar projects and it would have received between $3 million and $5 million from the two 262-foot turbines over that same time span.

“It’s quite clear to me the financial benefits from the wind project are not even close in comparison to solar,” he said.

In January of last year, the Select Board approved a permit for the turbines over the objection of neighbors and after more than four years of study.

Town Meeting approved $9.2 million to purchase and construct the turbines later that same month.

Neighbors countered by filing a lawsuit in Superior Court, hoping to block the project.

But Cressman said the town pursued solar initiatives “on parallel tracks” with its plans for the turbines.

And after signing a contract last week for the solar project off Old Fall River Road, he said there was no room on its net metering load for the turbines.

Neighbors celebrated in Town Hall after the decision.

Jeanne Nesto, one of the organizers, cried. “It has been a long time. I’m so relieved,” she said, wiping away tears.

She said the 45 families who fought the project did so because of possible health concerns with the turbines near their homes. She said it wasn’t because of any opposition to alternative energy.

David Costa and Nesto said the families held fundraisers and raised nearly $60,000 to hire attorneys and engineers to fight the project.

“I’m very excited. The amount we have spent has been incredible. It has been an ordeal,” he said.

“I commend the board for making the right decision,” said Don Neves, an opponent of the project.

But Beverly Days, an opponent of the project who doesn’t live near the site of the turbines, was still upset after the decision because she felt the health questions surrounding the project were so serious that town officials should not have shelved the project sooner.

“I think it’s appalling what the town did to these people,” she said. “They aren’t collateral damage.”

Watson, Cressman and other Select Board members defended their pursuit of the wind project, saying they were doing their “due diligence” and spent “hundreds of hours” researching the issues.

Watson said the town acted carefully throughout the process and Cressman said he felt their approach in pursuing the turbines was “measured and reasonable.”

Select Board member Joseph L. Michaud said initially it seemed wind would be more financially beneficial to the town. But he said when solar power became the more attractive alternative, the town adapted.

Select Board member William J. Trimble said he weighed the costs, which included the expense of defending the town against the neighbors’ lawsuit, against the benefits and decided to vote to terminate the wind project.

“It doesn’t look like the benefit is there to justify the cost,” he said.

Select Board member Lara H. Stone said one of the benefits with solar is its acceptance by the public.

“You’ve got to love solar power,” she said. “There are no waves at all with the public.”

Select Board member Shawn D. McDonald said the issue held the potential to split the town in half but it didn’t because of the way the discussion was conducted.

He said occasionally people became “hot” but for the most part they kept their composure.

“I applaud both sides for the way they have conducted themselves in this debate,” he said.

• Enables the state to override local decisions on permitting industrial wind turbines, access roads, transmission lines, and substations.

• Allows local zoning and non-zoning requirements to be waived in permitting these projects.

• Sets aside state laws that were written to protect local health and safety.

• Eliminates the most important rights of public participation in the review of wind projects.

• Severely limits rights of appeal.

Your community has enough area with wind resources to be affected by this legislation.

Here is more information on WESRA

The Wind Energy Siting Reform Act shifts final decision-making power over everything to do with permitting industrial wind turbines in your municipality from local elected officials to an appointed state board that has never rejected a power plant application.

If your municipality has a spot where even a single industrial-scale wind turbine could be erected, your municipality will be subjected to this unprecedented loss of local control.

The purpose of WESRA is to promote the development of wind turbines by streamlining and accelerating the permitting process and by restricting – and in most cases eliminating – traditional rights of appeal by municipalities and the public.

There are two virtually identical versions of WESRA, Senate No. 1666 and House No. 1775.

Both are the subject of two public hearings, one that already took place on September 7, 2011, in Hancock MA, and the second scheduled for September 26, 2011, in Barnstable MA.

After the second hearing, the legislature could vote at any time to adopt WESRA.

Please weigh in by calling or submitting written comments to the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy.

Your state legislators, the Senate President and Speaker of the House, and the Massachusetts Municipal Association also need to hear your opinion.

WESRA will be adopted if communities like yours do not object.

Here are the key points of WESRA:

• It allows the state to permit a wind project even if the municipality denies a permit.

• It replaces all state laws that ordinarily govern the construction and operation of wind turbines and associated infrastructure with standards that are created by a single state agency, and can be waived at that agency’s sole discretion.

• It eliminates almost all rights of appeal, including the existing right of municipal officers and boards to appeal a decision of a municipal board.

• It applies not just to wind turbines, but also to the associated public and private roads, transmission and distribution lines, substations, and any other building, structure, or equipment that is part of the turbine project.

Here is what happens at the local level under WESRA:

Under WESRA, if the state determines that your municipality has at least one “significant wind resource area,” your select board must appoint a Wind Energy Permitting Board (WEPB) which is completely independent of any municipal oversight. If your municipality does not have such an area but, nonetheless, one or more wind turbines totaling 2 megawatts in size is proposed, then your select board has the option of appointing a WEPB or designating the planning board as the WEPB:

• The local WEPB can waive all municipal zoning and non-zoning requirements, including bylaws adopted by town meeting, ordinances, regulations, and any other local rule in order to permit the project or permit it with conditions.

• The time period for making a decision is tight and inflexible. Failure to meet the deadlines results in a constructive approval.

• For compensation to the municipality, the local WEPB can require only certain fees to retain consultants, a “community mitigation fee” capped by the state, and up to 10% of the electricity generated from the project. Anything else must be negotiated with the developer.

• The local WEPB must issue a written decision. Once that is issued — regardless of whether or not it is an approval — the developer can proceed to the state for a permit.

• If the local WEPB issues a decision that other municipal boards oppose, unlike under current zoning law, there is no means for a municipal officer or board to appeal the decision. (See M.G.L. Chapter 40A, Section 17 for current law.)

• Neighbors to a project can no longer go to superior court to appeal a local approval of a wind project; their only recourse – and only if they are “substantially and specifically aggrieved” – is to the state Energy Facilities Siting Board, which cannot reverse a local approval.

Here is what happens at the state level under WESRA:

Once the wind developer receives a written decision from the local WEPB – whether or not it is an approval – the next step is the state Energy Facilities Siting Board. The EFSB is appointed entirely by the governor and his staff:

• Under WESRA, all state laws are replaced by standards, which the EFSB writes, and which it can apply or waive at its discretion in order to permit a wind project.

• Even if a wind project does not meet any of those standards, the EFSB can still permit it.

• The timetable is short and, contrary to current law, any flexibility is at the sole discretion of a single EFSB hearing officer. On even the most complex and controversial projects, a final decision must be issued within a year.

• Unlike every other energy project before the EFSB, a wind project is not reviewed under adjudicatory procedures, so customary rights of participation and appeal by municipalities and the public are lost. Furthermore, the process of review and appeal under state laws such as the wetlands protection act is also lost.

• Just as municipal officers and boards have no standing to appeal a decision of the local WEPB to the EFSB, they have no standing to appeal a decision of the EFSB.

• The state agencies that our municipalities usually depend upon to help assess complex projects no longer have a review and approval role under WESRA. Their only job is to make recommendations (which can be ignored) and enforce decisions issued by the EFSB.

The governor’s office, which is pushing WESRA, has claimed repeatedly that the legislation does not override local denials of a permit. That is not true. Under current law, if a project of any type requires both local and state permits, it cannot be constructed without both sets of permits. That is not the case under WESRA. Under current law, there is an exception for some large power plants, but those can seek an overriding state permit only after demonstrating every effort to obtain local approval first, and all rights of participation in the review process and appeal by neighbors, municipal officers and boards, and other interested parties still apply. Not so under WESRA.

WESRA completely re-writes the rules for a single industry, and regardless of your opinion about the value of wind turbines in your municipality, ceding control to an appointed state agency over the location, size, and operation of a wind facility, roads, and transmission corridors ought to be of concern to every local public official. After all, if the wind industry succeeds in carving out special privileges for itself in state law, every other powerful industry will seek the same benefits.

Keep in mind that WESRA will affect not just development of wind projects in your municipality, but also all other development because wherever massive wind turbines are erected you can be sure residential and commercial development will avoid those areas.

There is tremendous political pressure on the state legislature from the governor’s office and the wind industry and its allies to pass WESRA. Please contact your state legislators, the Massachusetts Municipal Association, and the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy. The Senate President and Speaker of the House need to hear your position, also.  

WESRA will pass if your municipality and others do not object.

Here is the schedule for the hearings of the Joint Committee:

• The first hearing was at Jiminy Peak in Hancock MA, Wednesday, September 7, 2011.

• The second hearing will be at Tilden Arts Center, Cape Cod Community College in Barnstable MA, Monday, September 26, 2011, starting at 10:00 a.m.

Here is the information for contacting key legislators:

Senator Ben Downing, co-chair

Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy

Benjamin.Downing@masenate.gov

(617) 722-1625

Representative John Keenan, co-chair

Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities & Energy

John.Keenan@mahouse.gov

(617) 722-2263

Senator Therese Murray, Senate President

Therese.Murray@masenate.gov

(617) 722-1500

Representative Robert DeLeo, Speaker of the House

Robert.DeLeo@mahouse.gov

(617) 722-2500

Here is the person to contact at Massachusetts Municipal Association:

Geoffrey Beckwith, Executive Director

gbeckwith@mma.org

(617) 426-7272

To learn more about WESRA, you can download the Senate and House versions:
http://www.malegislature.gov/Bills/187/Senate/S01666

http://www.malegislature.gov/Bills/187/House/H01775
If you have questions or want more detailed information, please visit our website, www.windwisema.org.

In reality, wind energy may well be the least sustainable and least eco-friendly of all electricity options. Its shortcomings are legion, but the biggest ones can be grouped into eight categories.

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