By Robert Bradley Jr. — June 2, 2022
“The airborne pressure pulses which emanate from wind turbines cause physiological and psychological damage to individuals in different ways and at different intensities (some individuals are unaffected)…. Homes become uninhabitable and very difficult to sell.”
“[T]here is much evidence that would be exposed in a court action by a skilled barrister that could be hugely damaging to the wind company and, indeed, the whole industry. The industry knows that and will not be keen to take that course.” (DeFrock, below)
The website clearinghouse DeFrock offers a current report on the state of litigation by victimized landowners against industrial wind turbines in Australia, a Net Zero hotspot. “A Guide to Seeking Damages From Wind Energy Project Owners/Operators,” is reproduced below. And more than this, plaintiffs are winning in court against Big Wind. [1]
Such matters are of international import, as reported in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. In many EU countries, including Germany, Italy, Poland, France, and Hungary,
a powerful coalition of interests … has been trying to pump the brakes on renewable-energy development as wind turbines and solar panels have spread across the continent. Local officials increasingly fear wind towers and solar farms will clash with Europe’s landscapes of châteaus, churches and farms; wildlife groups say an earlier generation of projects didn’t properly account for the impact on birds and bats.
“There are areas where renewable capacity has already used the low-hanging fruit in terms of land available, and you can see opposition coming,” said Jonathan Bonadio, senior policy adviser at SolarPower Europe, the industry’s main lobbying group. [2]
And you thought that wind and solar were ‘renewable’ beyond the scarcity of real-world siting issues, not to mention simple economics.
DeFrock’s primer on wind issues follows:
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Whilst DeFrock writers and editors independently research topics of interest, in many cases they come across documents written by others that are appropriate to the subject.
This particular document was originally prepared for discussions with the Australian National Wind Farm Commissioner and owners of wind turbine projects (WTPs) considered by their neighbours to be problems.
It is intended to give some broad guidance to neighbours of WTPs on the construction of a financial claim for damages.
Cause of Damage
Wind turbines emit airborne (sound) and ground-borne (vibration) pressure waves. Much is known about sound waves (the audible portion of which is identified as noise) and their ability to harm and disturb neighbours up to 10 to 12 km from turbines. It is also known that vibration can also be a factor in disturbance, but at this point, it is low frequency sound and ultra-low frequency sound (infrasound), particularly where amplitude modulation is present, that causes most damage. It is amplitude modulation, pulsing at an infrasonic rate. [3]
The airborne pressure pulses which emanate from wind turbines cause physiological and psychological damage to individuals in different ways and at different intensities (some individuals are unaffected).
In time the body can become increasingly sensitised and ultimately permanently damaged. Homes become uninhabitable and very difficult to sell. Residents become trapped in unsafe locations.
A second form of damage is productivity of farm animals and the possibility that farm strategies and processes have had to be changed.
However the principal matters of damage are family health and well-being, and the habitability of the family residence.
Constructing a Financial Claim
Preparing a claim will need the help of a lawyer and a property valuer. To help your lawyer prepare and substantiate the claim he or she could start by referring to the Waubra Foundation,[1] Stop These Things websites and information on this site.
The following components and indicative numbers have been prepared on the “a reasonable person would think that” basis.
First, the major element is the sale of your house to the WTP owner or to an entity chosen by them. The price asked should not be a present valuation, i.e., with turbines present; but the price that the property would be worth if there was no WTP in the area. This will involve briefing a first class valuer. Your lawyer will advise whether a second valuation should be sought.
Second there should be an add-on for the disturbance of having to move to another dwelling, which might be say, a 10% to 20% premium to the property price.
Third there should be a refund of all the property replacement expenses such as valuation, stamp duty, legal documentation and conveyancing, and direct moving expenses.
Fourth is compensation for the damage and hurt caused by living in the dangerous and harmful environment for the period since the project was commissioned. It is suggested this compensation should be calculated by multiplying the number of persons living in the house by the number of years the damage has been endured and then by a dollar sum per person per year. Note that there is plenty of evidence of damage, some permanent, to neighbouring residents.
This dollar sum will depend on the severity of disturbance which generally will correlate with the separation between the house and the nearest turbines, and educated guesses on what courts would award, then discounted for the risk and expense of going to court.
A Suggested Scale For Assessing Damage or Nuisance
| Condition | $/Person/Year |
| Forced to evacuate the home | 150,000 to 200,000 |
| Forced to live away as much as possible | 100,000 to 150,000 |
| Major discomfort | 50,000 to 100,000 |
If you wish to make a claim then consider where your family sits in the above categories and be sensible in selecting that rating.
Should You Engage a Lawyer?
Yes. A lawyer is required to draft your claim and to be present and to manage negotiations with the WTP involved. Some lawyers have experience in dealing with project owners.
Should You Join With Others Affected by the Same Wind Project?
Yes; provided they are willing to pay their share of costs and will be rational, particularly not wanting to rank themselves at a higher level of damage than is reasonable, and will act together and not deal behind your back. Combining with others will, of course, reduce the cost of hiring a lawyer to draft and present your claim.
The National Wind Farm Commissioner
Experience has shown that engaging with the Wind Farm Commissioner in discussions with the owner of the offending wind project is a waste of time. If he calls you refer him to your lawyer.
Beware Inappropriate Confidentiality Agreements
In settling problems in the past the industry used “gag “clauses, which are designed to stop other claimants from knowing what is possible. Your lawyer can advise on this matter. DeFrock thinks that as much disclosure as possible will bring about uniform understanding between claimants and quicker resolutions.
What About Court Action?
It is in the interests of both parties to negotiate a fair settlement. Court actions are expensive and there is a risk of losing and having to meet the costs of the other side.
On the other side there is much evidence that would be exposed in a court action by a skilled barrister that could be hugely damaging to the wind company and, indeed, the whole industry. The industry knows that and will not be keen to take that course.
Even with the “help” of the Wind Commissioner, attempts at reaching out of court settlements have failed, with major wind companies offering nothing that could be considered acceptable. Not only that, but brutally noting that a court action is beyond the financial capacity of a complainant and that if the wind company wins, costs will fall to the complainant.
DeFrock understands that at least one group and more likely two, have ridden out the threats and are proceeding to Court in Victoria to force a settlement.
[1] Recent victories in Australia have been over “noisy turbines” and “Wind Farm Syndrome.”
[2] Matthew Dalton and Eric Sylvers, “Energy Headwinds Rattle Europe Plan to Stop Buying Russian Natural Gas, Use More Renewables Runs Into Opposition,” Wall Street Journal (May 31, 2020). The authors add: “The obstacles are threatening to undercut Europe’s political will for a rapid shift away from fossil fuel in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.”
[3] Cooper-SA.-Wind-farm-infrasound-Are-we-measuring-what-is-actually-there-or-something-else . Refer to the Waubra Foundation website for information on current research, health impacts caused by infrasound, low frequency noise and vibration, and other legal cases.
Stop These Things, indeed.
They are far worse than useless.
I wonder if a class action lawsuit could be brought up against the climate fraudsters who are fundamentally trying to ruin us financially by demonizing CO2. Love to see them squirm. First case should be Al Gore.
It is easy to show all climate models are wrong. All have rising temperature trends in the tropical Pacific NINO4 region where there can be none because the ocean surface has been approaching or even reaching the 30C maximum for the last 10,000 years.
Any climate model that has open ocean surface constantly above 30C is pure and simple unphysical nonsense.
The 30C limit was identified at least as early as the 1970s in the literature and numerous times since and yet climate models ignore this hard physical constraint. The process of deep convection balances surface energy input and output at 30C so excursions above this temperature in open oceans are fleeting.
Climate models would not pass any reasonable due diligence in an engineering sense. There have been criminal conspiracies uncovered and there would be more if climate models were challenged in court. The question is – who should be accountable for all the waste? Who created the models? Syukuro Manabe has the Nobel prize for climate modelling – should he be the one held accountable for the lack of real worlds physics in the models – would he be up to the pressure? Get him in a courtroom and he would readily admit that the climate models are not fit for the purpose they are now used – as the basis for wasting vast resources on worse than useless weather energy extractors.
RickWill says:
“It is easy to show all climate models are wrong”
Surely it does not require an awful lot of work to do this. Use the models themselves to prove it.
If there are 30 or so “models” and NONE of them really agree with another one then isn’t it a logical conclusion that they must all be WRONG since there would only be one correct answer and none of them can agree which one it is.
It works for me.
Utter nonsense. we have had 25 years and more of large scale wind and no actual evidence of damage.
We’ve known the effects on people for a long time
#BigWindKnew
According to Mariana Alves Pereira the fix is in in the U.S.
Doctors will not perform the medical tests that show the physiological tissue changes caused by exposure to infrasound (which can lead to very serious health problems). If you let the doctor know you suspect damage due to being within the range of wind turbine infrasound pulses (possibly up to 20 km from the turbine) they will terminate any diagnosis of your problems. I don’t know that this is true vis a vis doctors, only that she reported it.
Studies going back to the early days of NASA, and progressing into recent years, have accumulated evidence of chronic infrasound exposure damage. The tissue changes responsible are not revealed by the normal range of medical tests although the existence of medical problems can be quite evident. The causative tissue changes can be diagnosed by techniques devised over a number of years but those are not tests commonly performed for other conditions.
So far, I have seen nothing, except the empty comments such as Griff offers, to dispute the evidence collected on the real damage infrasound can cause. Mostly it is just ignored.
I believe it is the first lecture listed below where Mariana Alves Pereira describes the tissue damage in detail and various medical conditions that arise from those changes. It is in another lecture where she talks about the difficulties of getting any medical cooperation in the U.S.
earlier work on infrasound
https://www.intechopen.com/books/acoustics-of-materials/acoustics-and-biological-structures
wind turbines infrasound lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXCZ3OyklrE
list of other lectures and interviews on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mariana+Alves+Pereira
#BigWindKnew … ROFL what goes around comes around … I love it.
Try telling that to the dead birds and bats littering the ground underneath them
They’re not dead. They’re just pining for the fjords.
“pining for the fjords”
And all the other affected wildlife that are struggling to survive around these industrial monstrosities
WIND TURBINES CAUSE CHRONIC STRESS IN BADGERS (MELES
MELES) IN GREAT BRITAIN.
https://stopthesethings.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/agnew-wind-turbine-stress-badgers.pdf
In most civilized countries, property owners have a legally enshrined “right to quiet enjoyment” of their freehold and / or leased, rented properties.
That was certainly proven in a recent judgement in Victoria Australia where the neighbors of an established wind farm were awarded half a million $ in damages & costs for the disturbing audible noise of the turbine blades.
So the judge didn’t think the complaints were “nonsense”.
Go get yourself a tent and live close to a wind turbine for a month. Report back.
Just stay at Bremer Bay, WA. The caravan park will do. Just one less than a km away whoop whoop whoop for a few nights is enough.
… except in those areas where there is proof of damage
Au contraire, o bear of little brain, we have had 25 years or more of evidence piling up of large scale wind damage. Courts do not flip a coin to decide who wins or loses a case, y’know – it’s done on balance of evidence and the weight of evidence is against the wind industry. You might dismiss the rule of law as ‘utter nonsense’ but the rest of us feel quite strongly about our legal rights.
Griffith, did your Mom drop you on your head recently ?
and no actual longterm benefit production wise for the massive outlay either
25 years and they still can’t stand on their own two feet without subsides and gas/coal
back up. Piss poor track record that I would be embarrassed to brag about…..
but then it’s griffy
So all the sufferers are liars. Thanks sensitive Griff.
Windmill installers ought to have to place money in escrow to pay for the removal and disposal of the windmills and bases when they are no longer functional.
Depending upon who one might ask, the energy trade-off between how much energy is used to construct a wind turbine, and how much energy the turbine generates during its lifetime, is often close to one-to-one (again, DEPENDING on who is asked). Even if the wind turbine ‘wins’ on generating more energy than is used to create it, once you figure in de-construction, INCLUDING removal of the concrete, it is a clear net-energy consumer.
I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who call wind/solar “free energy”, right up until the part where I ask them what goes into creating the wind generator or solar panel.
Then, I tell them about the Casper (Wyoming) land fill, one of the very few in the nation that is taking old turbine air foils, and how much of our landfill is being used up by discarded blades.
I then show people photos of abandoned oil wells (either a ‘dry hole’ or the well reached the end of its useful life), the land is all reclaimed (returned to its original condition before the rig arrived), and the only thing that shows is a two-metre tall steel rod (about 10 centimetres in diameter) with the name of the operator, the location, total depth, etc (required by law). In some cases, depending on the angle of the photo, one has difficulty seeing the marker at all.
What’s so great about wind and solar?
Regards to all,
Vlad
While I am not a believer in Climate Doomism nor a fan of the Rube Goldberg-esque electricity grid based on wind-solar-batteries-continental grids-pumped hydro-hydrogen production-[fill in next fad here] – I have a hard time believing that, say, wind turbines don’t produce enough energy to make up for what’s used to make it.
Energy is proportional to the cost of the unit – the more energy needed to make it the more it’s going to cost. The wind turbines, at least the current ones, are at least breaking even I would think, not counting subsidies. For instance, a 5MW turbine, say 25% capacity factor, say a reasonable 2¢/KWh wholesale rate, should be able to produce about $219M/yr in electricity. That should be enough to at least pay for itself, which implies that it is enough to cover it’s energy debt.
I know that is only guesstimating, so I appreciate any further information or links – not that I want to force wind or solar on anyone.
You scratch the surface of the real problem with assessing the cost:benefit of wind & solar –
just about every aspect of their inputs, manufacture, placement, operation, maintenance, storage, distribution, subsidization, and product pricing is shrouded in obfuscation / non-disclosure or outright falsehoods.
Perhaps a new mantra from w&s “clean energy” advocates is required –
COME CLEAN!
You are off by a factor of 1,000 on revenue, and you didn’t consider that O&M (excludes leases) runs about $0.02 per kWhr…
Regardless of money, energy in joules, watt-hours , whatever physical unit, is something real. Some large amount of energy is consumed to build and install a wind turbine. In use it produces energy intermittently. Most turbines will need maintenance at various times; that requires more energy. If it is to be decommissioned and removed after it short life, more energy is consumed.
If the energy it produces is not quite a bit more than is consumed by the various processes, its very existence creates a societal death spiral that cannot end well unless there is some other energy source so abundant as to render the stupidity of wind generated electricity irrelevant. In that unlikely case, wind power is just a folly akin to ripping out the hearts of sacrificial victims to mollify the weather gods. It is only the money making large corporations that benefit — at everyone else’s expense.
In terms of maintenance this research found the following in relation to downtime for onshore and offshore wind turbines (WTs).
Down time of critical sub assemblies
Generator- Onshore 24.2% Offshore 33.3%
Blades & Hub 18.2%……………22.2%
Gearbox………..24.2%……………33.3%
Drivetrain……….5.2%……………..11.1%
“failure rates for offshore WTs are generally higher than for onshore WTs and ..this applies for almost all sub assemblies. Electrical control system, generator, blades and hub, and pitch systems all experience high failure rates for both populations and their average failure rates are higher for offshore than on shore. Structure and gearbox sub assemblies follow the same pattern”
“When individual sub assemblly data are combined the offshore WT failure rate is roughly three times the weighted average onshore WT failure rate”
“The stoptime – duration a turbine does not generate power – are higher in almost every stoptime factor for offshore wind”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/we.2404
PCM,
Apologies, but I suspect you’ve moved the decimal point too far in your sums.
5MW, @20% , capacity factor, foe convenience – 1MW
8760 hours per year
8760 MWh per year.
2c/Kwh
$20/MWh. Then X 8760 MWh/year
C 175200 dollars per year
Now, if 25% capacity c $220,000 per annum.
Your 2c/KWH used.
Smiles and Happy, Platinum Jubilee.
Auto
Cost: !.3 MM x 5MW = $6.5 MM x 5% = $325,000 “annual opportunity cost” (plus $50,000/year maintenance) without the tax credits, low interest loans, accelerated depreciation allowances, mandates, and grid priority, Wind would not exist. BTW propeller replacement at “half-life” isn’t included in the maintenance estimate ($200k?). Oh, and what about disposal cost after 20 years ($500k?). Wind and solar are all about campaign contributions, uninformed voters, and the relentless democrat campaign of doing whatever they can to destroy the domestic oil and gas industry. It’s not complicated.
I was just looking at the energy invested vs energy out argument, it seemed too much of a stretch to claim an energy deficit – though I have to rethink that after seeing the KWh vs Wh error I made.
I never claimed that the wind turbines made economic sense!
Any link to a real, non-warmunist accounting for wind turbines, without all the contrived justification for them? The published numbers seem to good to be true – especially in light of the recent financial problems that turbine makers have been having.
Where did I go wrong?
5000000×0.25×365×24*$0.02, right?
Oops, that’s Wh not KWh.
Thanks for pointing that out.
My bad.
Another nail! Europe and US have, having severely damaged the oil and gas industry with their anti FF policies, only to discover that, surprise, surprise, that when you restrict supply by every means possible: regulation, constraining investment in, stopping fracking, cancelling pipelines, stopping resource land leasing on federal lands and offshore…. that the price for this indispensible backup for intermittent, low quality energy “necessarily skyrockets”.
This trainwreck was created by empty heads of state BEFORE the war in Ukraine! Blaming Russia for it won’t fly, but that’s all you’ve got to keep the pitch forks off the street. Households can’t pay for “rocketing” energy ptices, food shelves are empty, industries are being shuttered. The empty heada have just discovered also that nitrogen fertilizers require natural gas in their manufacture, so the potential for a famine for hundreds of billions of people from every continent is a looming concern (these problems effect all the globe).
Shame, shame on Western Empty Heads of state, and all institutions, NGOs, heartless phoney scientists, the Davos Billionaire perpetrators of crimes against humanity, co-conspirator MSM, de-educators and the minions useful idiots that cheerlead this atrocity. They think we will recover and continue with the Global Reset horror, but no! This is the beginning of the end of the idiocy. The appetite for renewables even by Empty Heads is gone.
You were doing great until the potential of famine for “hundreds of billions of people”.
hundreds of thousands of people (not hundreds of billions).. except Antarctica… and a couple typo’s. There now 100% great job!!
But, “The appetite for renewables even by Empty Heads is gone” is a little wishful. Despite the new sour taste dampening their appetite, they still feel the need to choke down large servings to “save the planet” from CO2 (plant food). “You Can’t Fix Stupid”.
The empty heads are now predicting that the average energy bill in the UK will rise to over £2900 pa by the end of the year. That’s over £55 ($69) per week.
Given the political positions of the Tories, Liberals, and Labor, how should people voice their displeasure on this when voting? Would a person voicing opposition to some Tory policies be allowed to run for MP as a Tory, or must he run as an independent?