Are the complaints about wind turbines valid?

Electricity is a form of power in which our world is always in need of. We can get electricity in a number of ways from the use of, water (dams and waves), nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind. This article deals with wind turbines.

There are many types of wind turbines. They can be separated into two general types based on the axis about which the turbine rotates. Turbines that rotate around a horizontal axis are the most common kind. All existing HAWTs (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine) have the main rotor shaft and generator at the top of a tower and must be pointing directly into the wind. Large turbines generally use a wind sensor coupled with a servomotor. They have a gearbox which turns the slow rotation of the blades into a quicker rotation that is more suitable for generating electricity.

Since a tower produces turbulence behind it, the turbine is usually pointed upwind of the tower. Turbine blades are made stiff to prevent the blades from being pushed into the tower by high winds. Additionally, the blades are placed a considerable distance in front of the tower and are sometimes tilted up slightly.

Downwind machines have been built, despite the problem of turbulence, because they don't need an additional mechanism for keeping them in line with the wind, and because in high winds, the blades can be allowed to bend which reduces their swept area and thus their wind resistance. Because turbulence leads to fatigue failures and reliability is so important, most HAWTs are upwind machines.

The most common modern wind turbines are usually three-bladed, but sometimes they are two-bladed or even one-bladed (and counterbalanced), and pointed into the wind by computer-controlled yaw motors. The rugged three-bladed turbine type has been championed by most electrical suppliers. These have high tip speed ratios, high efficiency, and low torque ripple which contributes to good reliability. This is the type of turbine that is generally used to produce electricity. For large, commercial size horizontal-axis wind turbines, the generator is mounted in a nacelle at the top of a tower, behind the hub of the turbine rotor.

With the availability of long distance electric power transmission, wind generators are now often on wind farms in windy locations and huge ones are being built offshore, sometimes transmitting power back to land using high voltage submarine cable.

Offshore wind turbines are considered to be less obtrusive than turbines on land, as their apparent size and noise can be mitigated by distance. Because water has less surface roughness than land, the average wind speed is usually higher over open water. This allows offshore turbines to use shorter towers, making them less visible. This gives the whiners less reason to complain but despite that, they still complain.

The government of Ontario has stated that there were only 750 complaints filed about wind turbines and only 50 people were behind the complaints in which 20 of those 50 that complained were the source of the majority of the complaints.

The offshore wind turbines are however, more expensive to build and operate. Offshore towers are generally taller than onshore towers once one includes the submerged height, and offshore foundations are generally more difficult and more expensive to build as well. Power transmission from offshore turbines is generally through undersea cable, which is far more expensive to install than cables on land and requires high voltage direct current operation if significant distance is to be covered which then requires yet more equipment. The offshore environment is also corrosive and abrasive. Repairs and maintenance are much more difficult, and much more costly than on onshore turbines. Offshore wind turbines are outfitted with extensive corrosion protection measures like coatings and cathodic protection. Despite these problems, they are still built offshore for two reasons, the first being the wind in unobstructed and they are for the most part, out of sight.

Unfortunately, there are people who have their homes on the shore who complain that offshore turbines look ugly and they want them out of sight. They are simply complaining because they want unobstructed views of the lake or ocean. It is not as if the wind turbines are their next door neighbours. They are generally quite some considerable distances from the shores so there isn’t any real justification for complaining.

A modern HAWT turbine running at its desired speed can deliver electricity to 500 households. So if you lived in a small village of 1,500, your electrical needs along with all of your neighbours would be met with just one wind turbine. It is a cheap method of providing electricity. The wind turbine can be several miles from the village. And equally important, it doesn’t polute the air.

A wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the same location used for production of electric power. Individual turbines are interconnected with a medium voltage (usually 34.5 kV) power collection system and communications network. At a substation, this medium-voltage electrical current is increased in voltage with a transformer for connection to the high voltage transmission system.

When my wife and I drove around southern California in 1990, we were amazed at the size of some of these wind farms. The wind turbines were quite close to one another and the wind farms stretched for miles. Of course, that is because the wind farms were in less populated areas.

When we drive around southern Ontario, we see wind farms but the wind turbines are some considerable distance from each other. The reason is quite obvious. Practically all the areas of Southern Ontario is farmland and it follows that the farmers don’t want their fields cluttered with large wind turbines.

Now one would think that wind turbines are a welcomed necessity but alas, there are many people who don’t want them in their back yard, rhetorically speaking.

High-school teacher Sandy MacLeod is near tears as she pulls out a plastic bag filled with orange earplugs. She says that she wears them every night when she goes to bed in order to muffle the sound of the blades whirling in the wind. MacLeod has a large wind turbine about 800 metres (approximately 2,400 feet) from her home which is part of Suncor Energy's Ripley wind farm located in the Townships of Huron-Kinross. She says the wind turbine disturb her sleep, trigger headaches and cause heart palpitations.

I have difficulty understanding her complaint. I have stood within a hundred feet of wind turbines and all I could hear is a slight swoosh as the blades rotate through the air. Wind turbines are hundreds of feet away from the nearest homes and standing outside when the wind turbines that are that far away; it is impossible to hear anything. And being inside a house would make hearing the swooshing noise an impossibility. This woman says that even when she puts earphones over her ears, she still hears the noise. Give me a break.

Others cite nausea, ringing in the ears, high blood pressure, heightened anxiety and depression as side effects. I need a bigger break.

Standing at the entrance of the Ontario Legislature, enduring rain on a chilly spring day, MacLeod is among a small group of rural citizens that call themselves Wind Concerns Ontario. They've gathered to protest the rapid development of wind farms in a province determined to go green, while Ontario is insisting there is no credible scientific link between human health and the noise or electromagnetic fields generated by properly sited wind turbines.

Indeed, a March 2009 survey of 301 residents in Essex County found that 87 per cent of those polled support plans to develop wind farms in their rural corner of southwestern Ontario. Admittedly, that could be because if they permit the wind turbines to be built and leased on their own farmland, they will be paid handsomely each year by the government for that right.

But this small, highly organized group of complainers will have none of it. Its members consider modern wind turbines over-hyped, underperforming industrial eyesores that threaten their rural way of life and many say, their health also.

They can't prove it, but MacLeod argues that nobody has demonstrated that wind turbines don't make people sick. Is that logical? If I can’t prove that drinking properly treated water doesn’t make people sick, shall I presume that it does. Either wind turbines do have health effects or they don't. Both claims can't be true.
I agree however that turbines should be set back at least 1.5 kilometres (4,921 feet) from the nearest residence, though these people would prefer a complete halt in development of wind turbines.

What is true is that the wind industry in Europe has grown at a phenomenal rate, and North America is catching up fast. There are more than 1,700 wind turbines in Europe generating enough electricity to meet 4 per cent of continental demand.

Total wind-power capacity in the United States grew by 50 per cent in 2008 and is proceeding at another record pace each year. Here in Ontario, the province boasts the country's highest wind capacity and, under a new Green Energy Act and European-style feed-in tariff program, it hopes to accelerate development and attract green manufacturing jobs.

There's no shortage of projects on the drawing board. A recent survey commissioned by the Ontario Power Authority found there were 164 wind-energy projects under various stages of development, representing 13,382 megawatts of potential capacity.
That works out to the equivalent of 7,000 wind turbines, most scattered across southern Ontario. That's on top of the 900 megawatts of wind capacity built and connected to the provincial grid – and another 600 megawatts being developed under contract.

Under a new law, the Ministry of Environment set a universal minimum setback standard that all municipalities must meet. The current setback distance recommended by the Ministry of Environment is 400 metres. What they should do is set the wind turbines back 1.5 kilometres from the nearest home. An unscientific survey recently conducted that found 53 of 76 people living an average of 780 metres from the nearest wind turbine experienced what they described as negative health effects. Any such effects greater than a kilometre, would undoubtedly be highly unlikely.

"I don't take it seriously when they ask for a two-kilometre setback," said the former Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman in February 2008 when he tabled his green-energy legislation. In his view, a 500-metre minimum is a reasonable starting point that goes beyond the distances previously set by most municipalities.

Several wind developers said that any setback one kilometre or more would kill the economics of most wind projects in Ontario. Developers would have to purchase or access significantly more land and lay more electrical cable to accommodate such distances.

At the moment, however, there's no convincing evidence that wind turbines located a few hundred metres from a dwelling negatively effect health. A 2008 epidemiological study and survey, financed by the European Union, generally supports that view. Researchers from Holland's University of Groningen and Gothenburg University in Sweden conducted a mail-in survey of 725 rural Dutch residents living 17 metres to 2.1 kilometres from the nearest wind turbine. The survey received 268 responses and, while most acknowledged hearing the swishing sound that wind turbines make, the vast majority; 92 per cent said they were satisfied with their living environment.

Perhaps most telling is that those most annoyed by turbine noises had a negative view of wind turbines to begin with, while those least annoyed gained economically by having turbines on their land or owning shares in a community wind-turbine venture. The study also concluded there was no indication that the sound from wind turbines had an effect on respondents' health.

Our home is less than a block from a railway line. Admittedly when we are on our outside deck at the rear of our house, the trains going by are disturbing but when they go by when we are inside our home, we don’t hear a thing.

People are always complaining about their health. Some of the complaints are real and others are merely imagined. But you can be sure, if a wind turbine is anywhere near a home, the people in the home will complain about their health and will state that their symptoms are related to the wind turbine.

But as any politician knows, gaining complete public acceptance is rare, indeed, impossible in the world of energy planning. Opposition to energy plans comes from every corner: groups opposing nuclear, communities against natural gas plants, farmers against solar parks, and rural residents against wind farms. However, if it is our goal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution from coal-fired electricity, then wind, while not the only answer, must be part of the answer. Obviously, the well-documented health effects from coal use and the threat that climate change poses to humans and other species must be weighed against the unproven links between wind turbines and human health.

There will always be people who complain about new advances in our society. They complained about automobiles on our streets. Their complaints were justified with respect to the potential of accidents and pollution but motor vehicles are a necessary evil that we have to live with. Without them, society would still be a century behind what we are accomplishing today.

Wind turbines are here to stay, although some will complain that they are noisy and ugly. However, when you look back to the beginning of the last century and consider that a great many people died from inhaling the smoke from the millions of coal-fed furnaces around the world, the wind turbines are satisfactory replacements for providing us with light and heating our homes and buildings with electricity.

FOLLOW UP: I have obviously offended some people with respect to this article and I am sorry that they feel this way. I have removed the word, "whiners" and replaced it with "people". I appreciate the fact that there are a great many people who don't want wind turbines in their areas because they honestly believe that the turbines have a detrimental effect on their health. However, if I later learn through a valid study that the government of Ontario is going to stop building them near homes because of health issues, I will withdraw this article from my blog and write another one saying why wind turbines are dangerous to the health of people living near them.

I have been advised by one of my readers that someone has taken the province of Ontario to court with respect to wind turbines. I will write about the court's decision no matter what the decision is.

When I write these articles, I write them with sincerity. I may very well be wrong in some of my opinions but right or wrong, my opinions are honest ones. I take the task of writing articles in my blog very seriously since it is read all over the world. To do otherwise, would be an insult to my readers.