Where I live on the outskirts of Chico, I have an almost constant supply of wind. I’ve considered a wind turbine as a way of getting closer to being “off-grid” so that I don’t have to pay PG&E the exorbitant rates. After reading this ChicoER story, I think I’ll pass on a wind turbine and focus on more solar. – Anthony
From the Chico Enterprise-Record: Disturbing the silence: Wind turbine not sustaining to neighbors’ sleep
By HEATHER HACKING – ChicoER Staff Writer
CHICO — A year and a half ago when Don Steinsiek installed a wind turbine at the top of Stilson Canyon Road, he was excited to harness the wind.He had been interested in the technology for a while, and when tax credits and rebates became available, he went for it.
The wind will vary, but he figured with the incentives, he could pay off his $82,000 investment in six or seven years.
When energy generation is greater than his use, he can sell electricity to the grid for 5 cents a kilowatt. But overall, he said the turbine provides energy for about two-thirds of his energy use.
It sounded like a good plan, and fit with the trend toward renewable energy sources. But neighbors say the wind turbine ruins the quiet nature of the neighborhood, lowers their property values and deprives them of sleep.
At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting there was a lengthy discussion of Steinsiek’s turbine.
The state is passing new rules that will make it easier to install small wind structures, explained Tim Snellings, county development services director. Unless Butte County passes its own rules before Dec. 31, the new state rules will apply, he continued.
Neighbors took the opportunity to talk about the wind turbine.
O.J. Sutherland lives at the bottom of the hill from the turbine. He described the sound as similar to a “hovering helicopter to a whining or moaning sound.”
He told the supervisors some neighbors have changed the rooms in which they sleep, others wear earplugs and some just can’t sleep.”We no longer have a quiet neighborhood. There is only one acceptable relief — to remove it,” Sutherland said.
Farther down the road is Gary Marquis, who said for 20 years he has heard frogs and crickets. “Now I listen to a wind turbine,” he said.
Read the full story here at the ChicoER
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Your current comfort and enjoyment of life are a small price to pay for your future comfort and enjoyment of life.
/logicfail
I’m convinced. Those that say wind power is silent have never listened to a turbine before.
Windmills are fine. As long as we can’t see them, or hear them. So, tell me again where you want those wind farms?
I’ve heard these stories about people saying wind turbines ruin their sleep… I’ve read them and tried to understand but I can’t because my bedroom sits within 300 meters of a 2 MW turbine and my sleep has never been interrupted. I’ll be honest, the first week thats all I could hear but my brain has shut the sound off… I really dont know that its there anymore.
What issue I do have with the windmills is the ice formation during the winter….. these things are supposed to shut down when the icicles forming on that blades becomes too heavy….. I’ve seen with my own eyes the ice shards shatter and are thrown into the fields.
If you’re standing anywhere near that turbine … you’re dead.
Well, if i buy a big racing car and run it at 6000 rpm the entire night i am also going to ruin my neighboors sleep. This case sounds to be like a case of bad engineering of the wind turbine. Building a wind turbine is always a compromise between price and sound level. If you use a big generator you can run the wings at low rpm and a low sound level but a big generator is expensive and heavy. If you use a small generator the rpm will be high with a high sound level but the price will be low.
Yes, wind turbines are noisy as hell. I know it well, after visiting several massive installations here in Spain. Maybe they don’t pollute in a chemical sense, but oh man, they do pollute with sound!
The difficult thing for this technology is that, for it to give the best of benefits, you have to put them somewhere high, at the top of a high hill or a mountain, where wind will blow stronger, and in order for them not to disturb people with the terrible noise it has to be a rather issolated area. So far, it doesn’t look difficult to achieve. But you also need to have a very good road leading there. I mean, two wide lanes, and no big turns, because some of the pieces of those huge towers need to be taken there in one piece. And you need huge lorries to do that. And they have to reach the installation site. And who has very good roads leading to the top of mountains where nobody lives? The logistic problems are a very big headache.
I find it hard to believe that a turbine that size would bother the person in the house let alone the neighbors. It looks to be fairly rural so I would assume that he could have easily built it a hundred feet from the house. Unless there is something wrong with bearings, that shouldn’t be that loud. Some people just work hard at finding something to complain about.
Anyone who has ever been to Tehachapi knows of this nightmare. You can hear them half a mile away. The technology is totally fragile, so the optimal turbines are simply unreliable as well as unsightly and noisy. Everyone I know who has installed a wind system has shut it down, often with a very expensive lawn fixture rusting away, that will require much more money to take down. It is a scam.
I assume most of the noise comes from the vortex generated at the tip of each blade. Airplanes put winglets at the tip of their wings to reduce the vortex generated by the airplane wings. Couldn’t winglets be put on the tips of the generator blades to reduce the strength of the vortex generated and thus reduce the sound level?
REPLY: Perhaps, could also be the gearing and shaft too. I stood next to one like this and noise seemed more mechanical in origin. -A
I frequently ride my bicycle past two wind generators which I think are about the same size as the one in the picture, and I’ve never noticed any particular noise even when I’ve stopped to check them out. Since they sit just a little way off the road in someone’s yard, any unusual noise should have been evident. Of course, that doesn’t mean the wind generator in Chico isn’t producing obnoxious sounds; just might mean what someone else suggested which is that it’s not functioning correctly. Since I find my sleep disturbed often enough by the barking dogs and loud cars in my neighborhood, I have a lot of empathy for anyone bothered by noises.
Solar technology certainly has a future but not wind technology. There is something decidedly archaic about wind tech. While the usefulness of solar technology has long been proven in space, all wind powered instruments (sail ships, windmills) have become icons of romantic history. Fifty years from now people will look back at wind turbines as one of the most Quixotic attempts to to help us deal with the AGW hysteria.
Just imagine a neighborhood full of wind turbines. Hopefully the collective savings in electricity costs will equal the depreciation in property values!
I can tell you where I wouldn’t buy a home!
Give me clean, reliable, cheap and QUIET natural gas!
I visited an area in Kansas. They claim to have high average wind speed.
I looked at Wunderground and saw the last 2 days had wind and the 7 days before did not. When the wind dies in July and August, the towers relax.
Wind is great. For some reason, farmers try to avoid using windmills for water wells unless the well is just to far from electric power. I also don’t see the Navy returning to sailing vessels.
There is no doubt that wind power has some strong disadvantages. I suspect neighbors will raise a stink like they did in australia with the farms.
The purchase rate of electric put back into the system is far to low.
Ah I think that sort of large setup is inconsiderate for an urban location, there will always be someone that has a problem with constant noise, others can turn their minds off, but for some its difficult. I guess over time, some would be driven/turned to direct action – and after all it is a pretty large target!!
These sorts of neighborhood niggles have a great potential for turning sour in the worst way, I don’t think I would like to be the owner if they do.
I would have thought that the smaller vertical (axial) style wind vanes might be better on an urban power generator and quieter to operate and less intrusive on the eye.
As I said that thing is hard to ignore visually!
Not very cost effective yet, if you consider the *cost* the neighbors are paying for no power to them. Even the owner only gets 2/3 of his power from the turbine. Way too much investment for a poor return. This technology isn’t completely cooked yet. It is not going to solve all our energy needs.
Reminds me of Homer Simpson’s wind turbine…
If there are enough wind turbines in a neighborhood, you won’t get woken up by birds singing – because they will all be dead.
How many warning were ignored? Scadenfreunde is understandable here. Windmills will go the way of the once ballyhooed high rise housing projects, which promised to deliver modern and affordable housing to everyone. Today, like the windmills will be 20 or 30 years from now, they are nothing but big eyesores.
That should be “Schadenfreude”
There can’t be a silent turbine blade. When Enron came to Altamont Pass, they built thousands and the towers were small compared to today. The velocity of the tip of a large blade is extremely fast in meters per second. http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
My decision on wind turbines was made simply by looking at my local power station and a little arithmetic. This plant was a disaster as a nuke but was re-purposed to natural gas. I will be conservative and guess that it covers about 100 acres, although it is probably much less than that.
It generates a Gigawatt on demand. Now imagine the number of turbines to required to produce the same amount of power. Even using the “rated at” numbers for a Vestas V80 (1.8MW), that’s 555 turbines. Multiply that by the footprint of each, and you cover a huge amount of acreage.
While the land underneath can be used for crops, it’s not much good for anything else. Wind turbines shed ice, produce noise, and require maintenance. Here in the west, pivot sprinklers are used extensively for crops, and it would take a lot of coordination between farmers and power companies to co-exist on the same land.
I will keep my little gas fired power station, thank you.
The report ‘Wind Turbine Noise, Sleep and Health’ by Dr Chris Hanning BSc MRCS LRCP MB BS FRCA MD may have some bearing on this subject…
http://www.algonquinadventures.com/waywardwind/docs/Hanning-sleep-disturbance-wind-turbine-noise.pdf
I am surprised that there has been no mention of the damage to wildlife that large turbines may cause.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm/printable
The argument that more birds are killed flying into windows is true but think how many windows there are compared to the number of wind turbines.
The mortality rate per turbine has been put at two birds per year. How many birds have been killed flying into your windows? We had a sparrowhawk killed two years ago. One bird for more than twenty windows in forty years.
This is exactly what is happening in Sweden also but in large scale.
I am not talking about wind turbines for 1 house but hughe ones up to 100m in the nature. People are furious about thos turbinees when they get installed near their calm enveironment lowering the values of their houses while having to listen to the sound day and night, no more sleeping with open windows on hot summer nights.
Several independent local organizations pop up all over sweden nowdays trying to stop industrialization of the nature.
Interesting stuff from Wikipedia: Environmental effects of wind power / Effects of noise