If you hang around township halls in rural America, you’ll hear wind turbines being blamed for damn near everything, as one farmer confirmed for me a few weeks ago, above.
You’ll also hear people swear up and down that, according to their research, wind turbines have some kind of impact on health. For more than a decade we’ve been told that wind development in any community would bring on a zombie apocalypse.
Well, we have a lot of communities now that have had wind farms for more than a decade, and the zombies have not shown up. What has shown up is vastly increased funding for Schools, roads, fire-rescue, sheriff road patrols, libraries, senior services, garbage collection, and a host of other amenities that enhance health, safety, and welfare in rural areas.
I have a whole resource website with information on this at wind101.info.
Whenever the subject of windmills comes up with Donald Trump, usually because he brought it up, entirely unprompted, he always brings up a bizarre “condition” called wind turbine syndrome.
Due in part to the fact that he is a deeply stupid individual, he believes that the sound of a wind turbine turning and turning, infinitely, in its ceaseless quest to generate energy, can eventually drive a person mad.
A Polish study found that wind turbine syndrome is complete bullshit and that maybe Trump should shut the fuck up about it already. That last part wasn’t their conclusion, it was mine
The researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University have specialties in neuroscience and acoustics. Donald Trump’s expertise is being a corporatist who repeats whatever half-remembered gibberish an oil lobbyist spat at him during a round of golf.
In the study, researchers played 45 college students the sound of environments with different sound profiles — traffic sounds, silence, and the mechanical hum of wind turbines. To eliminate bias, the participants were never told what the purpose of the study was.
The participants were then asked to identify what the sounds were. Not even one of them could differentiate the sound of a wind turbine from the common ambient noises of life. Or, to quote the study’s authors, the sound of a wind turbine is no more “stressful or bothersome than road traffic noise.”
So why do people like Donald Trump complain about it? Because wind turbine syndrome isn’t an actual malady induced by green energy as much it’s a social disease present in people “primed by watching online information about health problems from wind turbines, reported more symptoms after being exposed to recorded infrasound or to sham (fake) infrasound,” according to the author of a different study on the origins of wind turbine syndrome.
This isn’t a groundbreaking study, either. Studies on the existence of wind turbine syndrome have been going on for at least a decade now, conducted by different teams from around the world with no connection to each other. The same conclusion they keep reaching over and over again is that it’s all bullshit.
The emerging truth of the “syndrome” is that people exposed to anti-wind turbine propaganda find themselves suddenly and inexplicably experiencing symptoms of wind turbine syndrome. It’s all a bunch of made up of bullshit that has more to do with political and ideological affiliation than it does your proximity to a wind farm.
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Way back in 2012, the State of Massachusetts conducted a year long review of global medical literature, and concluded the same thing.
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection:
- There is no evidence for a set of health effects, from exposure to wind turbines that couldbe characterized as a “Wind Turbine Syndrome.”
- The strongest epidemiological study suggests that there is not an association betweennoise from wind turbines and measures of psychological distress or mental healthproblems. There were two smaller, weaker, studies: one did note an association, one didnot. Therefore, we conclude the weight of the evidence suggests no association betweennoise from wind turbines and measures of psychological distress or mental healthproblems.
- None of the limited epidemiological evidence reviewed suggests an association betweennoise from wind turbines and pain and stiffness, diabetes, high blood pressure, tinnitus,hearing impairment, cardiovascular disease, and headache/migraine.
The most comprehensive and complete study on the topic was done by Health Canada, and included physiological as well as self reported data from over 1200 individuals across Canada in wind communities.
Health Canada – Wind Turbine Noise and Health:
1. Self-reported Sleep
Long-term sleep disturbance can have adverse impacts on health and disturbed sleep is one of the more commonly reported complaints documented in the community noise literature. Self-reported sleep disturbance has been shown in some, but not all, studies to be related to exposure to wind turbines.
The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) is a frequently used questionnaire for providing a validated measure of reported sleep pathology where scores can range from 0-21 and a global score of greater than 5 is considered to reflect poor sleep quality. The PSQI was administered as part of the overall questionnaire, which was supplemented with questions about the use of sleep medication, prevalence of sleep disorders diagnosed by a healthcare professional and how sleep disturbed people were in general over the last year.
Results of self-reported measures of sleep, that relate to aspects including, but not limited to general disturbance, use of sleep medication, diagnosed sleep disorders and scores on the PSQI, did not support an association between sleep quality and WTN levels.
2. Self-reported Illnesses and Chronic Diseases
Self-reports of having been diagnosed with a number of health conditions were not found to be associated with exposure to WTN levels. These conditions included, but were not limited to chronic pain, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, dizziness, migraines, ringing, buzzing or whistling sounds in the ear (i.e., tinnitus).
3. Self-reported Stress
Exposure to stressors and how people cope with these stressors has long been considered by health professionals to represent a potential risk factor to health, particularly to cardiovascular health and mental well-being. The Perceived Stress Scale is a validated questionnaire that provides an assessment of the degree to which situations in one’s life are appraised as stressful.
Self-reported stress, as measured by scores on the Perceived Stress Scale, was not found to be related to exposure to WTN levels.
4. Quality of Life
Impact on quality of life was assessed through the abbreviated version of the World Health Organization’s Quality of Life scale; a validated questionnaire that has been used extensively in social studies to assess quality of life across the following four domains: Physical; Environmental; Social and Psychological.
Exposure to WTN was not found to be associated with any significant changes in reported quality of life for any of the four domains, nor with overall quality of life and satisfaction with health.
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Another less well reported effect is the positive impact of reduced air pollution, as clean energy replaces shuttering fossil fuel generators.
Massachussetts Institute of Technology:
The researchers found that in 2014, wind power that was associated with state-level policies improved air quality overall, resulting in $2 billion in health benefits across the country. However, only roughly 30 percent of these health benefits reached disadvantaged communities.
The team further found that if the electricity industry were to reduce the output of the most polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants, rather than the most cost-saving plants, in times of wind-generated power, the overall health benefits could quadruple to $8.4 billion nationwide. However, the results would have a similar demographic breakdown.
“We found that prioritizing health is a great way to maximize benefits in a widespread way across the U.S., which is a very positive thing. But it suggests it’s not going to address disparities,” says study co-author Noelle Selin, a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “In order to address air pollution disparities, you can’t just focus on the electricity sector or renewables and count on the overall air pollution benefits addressing these real and persistent racial and ethnic disparities. You’ll need to look at other air pollution sources, as well as the underlying systemic factors that determine where plants are sited and where people live.”
Selin’s co-authors are lead author and former MIT graduate student Minghao Qiu PhD ’21, now at Stanford University, and Corwin Zigler at the University of Texas at Austin.