SOME homeowners consider a wind farm about as appealing a neighbour as a pig farm. Contrary to popular belief, however, it seems they have no effect on house prices.
The findings should reassure wind-energy producers, property developers and homeowners that turbines and houses can happily coexist, says Ben Hoen, an analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
As part of a US government-funded study, Hoen's team recorded the sale price of around 7500 homes in nine states and then devised mathematical models to reveal how, all other things being equal, proximity to a wind farm affected their value.
Not much, it turns out. Homes less than 1.5 kilometres from a wind farm sold for no less, on average, than homes 8 kilometres away. Similarly, home values tended to remain stable long after wind farms sprung up.
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Have your say
I visited a wind farm in Hawaii and it was quite noisy. No one would want to live next to that. People get upset about road noise from highways. Noise from wind farms is much worse.
Not all wind farms, a local one of 21 x Enercon 2.3MW windmills is very quiet unless you get close (~200yrds) to one of the windmills and are downstream. Enercon's have no gearbox which may also help.
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jet engines look really cool too
Exactly. Property values are not affected by their appearance like oil industry tried to claim in their ads.
I think wind turbines (vertical ones) are really quite beautiful.
I agree, some of the designs do look very cool. Silver with black blades is my favourite. They are the future
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Interestingly I've heard people saying the contrary, that highway noise is much more worse than wind farms. I suppose quality and age of the technology plays some role here?
The dearly departed Ted Kennedy blocked the installation of a wind farm because he could see it from his house.
Just another hypocritical socialist.
What does Socialism have to do with windfarms? if anything they would support such a radical change of energy production.
Having visited many wind farms and many suburban tract developments, I can say the rows of McMansions are far uglier than the rows of wind turbines. I know which one I'd rather live next to.
Which one? I've been to one near South Point on the the Big Island, yeah it made noise, but not that loud and I thought it a little soothing actually. But I like white noise.
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The size of the study, at 7500 homes is really small. If you want the real answer, phone a real estate agent in an infected area.
I know people who have listed houses at 50% of the price of their non turbine surrounded neighbours, and still not sold. One thing that Florida Light and Power has done is to buy houses that no one wants - and have the 'lucky' seller promise to not tell anyone about the reasons (usually health related) about selling.
Wind power is soviet style economics. The power of greenwashing is huge. Since most people live in cities, city politicians get the green vote, while people in the countryside take the hit - for almost no environmental benefit.
A big part of local economies is single home renovation and building. This disappears in turbine zones
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Once again, what does the political tendancies of Russia have to do with windfarms?
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