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Patriots for America
We Surround Rochester
Aug 28, 2010, Washington DC
By RICHARD COCKLE
c.2008 Newhouse News Service
BOARDMAN, Ore. — Sherry Eaton pulled into the driveway of her rural, high-desert home to see one of several giant wind turbines being assembled a half-mile away.
“I started to cry,” Eaton, 57, recalled of her first sight of the Willow Creek Wind Project in late July. “They’re going to be hanging over the back of our house, and now there’s the medical thing.”
“The medical thing” is new research suggesting that living close to wind turbines, as Eaton and her 60-year-old husband, Mike, soon will be doing, can cause sleep disorders, difficulty with equilibrium, headaches, childhood “night terrors” and other health problems.
Dozens of wind turbines are taking shape along Oregon 74, a designated Oregon Scenic Byway, near the home the Eatons have shared for 19 years.
Dr. Nina Pierpont of Malone, N.Y., coined the phrase “wind turbine syndrome” for what she says happens to some people living near wind energy farms. She has made the phrase part of the title of a book she’s written called “Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on the Natural Experiment.” It is scheduled for publication next month by K-Selected Press, of Santa Fe, N.M.
In contrast to those who consider wind turbines clean, green and an ideal source of renewable energy, Pierpont says living or working too close to them has a downside. Her research says wind turbines should never be built closer than two miles from homes.
Pierpont, 53, is a 1991 graduate of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and has a doctorate in population biology from Princeton University. Her interest was piqued by a wind farm being built near her upstate New York home, and she studied 10 families living near wind turbines built since 2004 in Canada, England, Ireland, Italy and the United States.
Pierpont’s findings suggest that low-frequency noise and vibration generated by wind machines can have an effect on the inner ear, triggering headaches; difficulty sleeping; tinnitus, or ringing in the ears; learning and mood disorders; panic attacks; irritability; disruption of equilibrium, concentration and memory; and childhood behavior problems.
Concerns also are coming out of Europe about low-frequency noise from newly built wind turbines. For example, British physician Amanda Harry, in a February 2007 article titled “Wind Turbines, Noise and Health,” wrote of 39 people, including residents of New Zealand and Australia, who suffered from the sounds emitted by wind turbines.
According to Pierpont, eight of the 10 families in her study moved out of their homes.
“All these problems were resolved as soon as these people got away from the turbines, got in the car and drove away from the house,” she said.
Mike Logsdon, director of development for Invenergy, developer of the 48 wind turbines under construction in the Willow Creek Wind Project, said he’s heard of Pierpont’s findings, but his 5-year-old company doesn’t find them credible.
“We’ve had a number of other wind farms over the country and residents living by them and never had any problems,” Logsdon said.
Invenergy has built and operates wind farms in Canada and Poland and in 12 states in the United States, Logsdon said. The company has 1,200 megawatts in production and is building 600 megawatts this year. The 72-megawatt Willow Creek Wind Project near the Eatons’ home is scheduled to start producing electricity Jan. 1.
If Pierpont’s theories gain acceptance, decisions on where future wind energy farms are built could be affected. Last year, more than one-third of all new power capacity in the United States, roughly 5,000 megawatts, was generated by wind turbines, said Joseph Beamon, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Department of Energy report said demand for electricity is likely to grow 40 percent in the next 22 years in the United States alone, with 20 percent of the nation’s power generated by wind turbines, he said.
The Eatons and their neighbors have more to worry about than the Willow Creek Project. Approval was given July 25 by the Oregon Facilities Siting Council for construction of as many as 400 more wind turbines in the nearby Shepherds Flat Wind Project spanning parts of Gilliam and Morrow counties. The planned 909-megawatt project by Caithness Energy of Chicago is expected to be the largest wind farm on Earth, generating enough peak energy to power 225,000 homes.
“Man, this whole country is going to be windmills,” said a dismayed Denny Wade, 59, a railroad worker and neighbor of the Eatons.
He and his wife, Lorrie, a 53-year-old schoolteacher, live three-quarters of a mile from one of Willow Creek’s turbines. The Wades had planned to sell the home where they’ve lived for four years and build a retirement home on a knoll 200 yards away with a view of Mount Hood.
“Now, the view that it had is all windmills,” Wade said. “I didn’t move out there to view windmills.”
But Denny Wade’s larger concern is his vulnerability to migraine headaches. Although not everyone living near wind turbines experienced headaches, Pierpont’s research suggests “everyone with pre-existing migraines” developed headaches by living near the wind generators.
The Wades scrapped plans to build a new home and hope to sell their 42 acres and move, they said.
Morrow County planner Carla McLane said potential health issues never were raised during the planning process in her county, and the opportunity to appeal has passed. The potential effects of turbines on the scenic values of Oregon 74 never were brought up in hearings he attended, said Terry Tallman, Morrow County Commission chairman.
Generally, wind energy farms have been welcomed in this sparsely settled corner of the state, Tallman said. Tax revenues from the wind farms will be distributed to the counties, public schools, park and recreation districts and fire departments, he said.
“Everybody that I’ve talked to has been very happy,” he said, adding that some on whose property the turbines are being built intend to retire on the income they receive.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Ron Wyscaver, 40, a neighbor of the Eatons and Wades, said of the wind turbines.
Caithness first proposed a 105-megawatt Shepherds Flat Project in 2002, then applied to the state for the larger project two years ago, McLane said. The project was so large it went to the Energy Facilities Siting Council, where it received the go-ahead to start construction.
Potential medial problems aside, wind turbines will wreck the tranquillity that Mike and Sherry Eaton came to this remote place to find, Sherry Eaton said. She drives 90 miles a day to and from her job in Hermiston so they can live in the high-desert setting.
“When you come home from work, everything drains away from you because it’s so quiet and peaceful,” she said, adding that’s about to end.
“Now we are going to have to listen to those windmills: Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!” she said.
(Richard Cockle is a correspondent for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at rcockle(at)oregonwireless.net.)
All POW-MIA
7 responses so far ↓
1 MugsysMom // Aug 13, 2008 at 11:44 am
Awww geesh! Don’t let my sister see this! She gets freaked out by the sight of these things! No need to give her any more reason to hate them!
But….if there are disturbances, which I can believe there might be……simply place these in less / unpopulated areas.
2 Leavingroch // Aug 13, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I can see this happening, I get very bad migraines from Flourscent lights ( I am sure I spelled that wrong). The low almost undectable flickering causes the migraines, and they last for a LONG time. I have been in treatment for several years and haven’t found anything to help yet.. I imagine the low frequency noise and vibration could and does cause problems.
Too bad money and energy is much more important then people
3 rochester_veteran // Aug 13, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I’m all for wind power, but there’s a downside for these wind farms. This is the first I’ve heard of the health and behavior effects. How’d you like to have a wind farm go up next to or near your property? Although I’m for the use of wind power, I wouldn’t want to live next to a wind farm.
Those blades are huge. When my son and I were headed up to the North Country just before Christmas, we saw blades being transported between Syracuse and Rochester. They must have been 100 feet long and had trailer wheels (reminded me of giant furniture dollies) attached to them.
4 phantomlord // Aug 13, 2008 at 2:42 pm
LR, they make ballasts now which multiply the frequency at which fluorescent lights flicker at. They’re pretty much unnoticeable by most people who complain about typical fluorescent bulbs.
5 MugsysMom // Aug 13, 2008 at 4:03 pm
I think these turbines look amazing – from a distance. I’m sure I wouldn’t want one in my backyard or anywhere too close by.
PL – how viable are these for an energy source?
6 phantomlord // Aug 13, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Windmills only produce power when it’s windy, so it’s unusable as a base load since it doesn’t produce power 24/7. They’re pretty expensive up front ($30k for a small one to power your house, more than a million for an industrial sized one) also need a LOT of maintenance, which, unfortunately tends to correspond to times when its windy and the turbine would normally generate power. An offline windmill is a useless power source. They also tend to kill a lot of birds who follow the wind streams and fly right into the blades.
Now, there are things you can do to mitigate those problems, but they aren’t really very good solutions either. You can store your excess power with batteries, so that you’ll have power in calm times. However, there are inefficiencies in the process of storing and releasing that energy, the batteries are very expensive and you have to replace them all every couple years. You can make bigger, slower turning windmills to reduce the likelihood of killing birds, but with a bigger windmill goes more upfront and maintenance costs.
There’s another little issue too… If we install huge swaths of wind farms, we’re going to alter the wind patterns in that area which will change regional weather, can do things like create swamps or deserts, etc. If you look at mountain ranges, the side which the prevailing winds come from tend to be overly wet and prone to floods and mudslides while the other side tends to be arid. The wind stalls going over the mountain and drops the moisture out of it. Take the Rocky Mountains for example. On the west side, you’ve got the lush California farms and wineries while on the east side, you’ve got the deserts of Arizona and Nevada.
Now, wind can be part of the solution, but it isn’t a solution in itself. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but it probably shouldn’t make up more than 10 or 15% or so of our peak load. Anything more and it will be too expensive and unreliable. Solar suffers from similar problems, and should make up a similar percentage (and solar is extremely inefficient to boot).
The most important power we need to worry about isn’t maximum peak power, it’s base load. We need to make sure we can supply the minimum amount of power required to keep our standard of living going. That means things like lights for your house, medical equipment, water pumps, restaurants and even industrial needs. Base power always has to be available or you can’t have base infrastructure. We only have 4 viable options for base power. Natural gas – the US has a lot of it and natural gas plants are trivial to turn on and off to make sure base power is maintained. Coal – again, we’ve got a ton of it and it makes up a good chunk of power across the US but it’s awfully dirty and actually releases more radiation than nuclear plants. Hydro – things like the Niagara River supply a constant stream of water that never runs out and will always produce consistent power. Finally, nuclear which is the most viable power source and we’ve got thousands of years worth of reserves here in the US even if we were to operate solely on nuclear fuel, but people are scared because of some of it’s early failings that we’ve long since engineered away.
The other big question is transportation. Mass transit is fine for cities, but it means giving up individual freedoms and leaves you at the mercy of the operator. It also doesn’t work for longer trips and people who live out in the sticks where there just isn’t enough traffic for mass transit to work at all. So, we need to do something about how to fuel our vehicles. Wind won’t work, solar doesn’t generate enough power and leaves you unable to drive at night, battery power is just a storage system and has a ton of problems between where to refuel as well as range, heating the vehicle in the winter, etc, hydrogen is just a container like a battery as well and needs a lot of energy to be created, biofuels steal farm land and food for energy and aren’t efficient enough for real large scale use, natural gas isn’t something you want around in a collision and oil is plagued with problems. There’s no immediate solution here, we’re really going to have to wait for technology, probably battery technology, to progress more and we’re going to have to spend hundreds of billions, maybe even in the trillions range, to upgrade our electrical infrastructure to handle it because it’s already antiquated and pushing the boundaries of its capacity. And most likely, that electricity is going to have to be generated via nuclear plants.
7 Sam M. // Aug 20, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Just for record The $$$ Bird Lobby and Syria Club are totally against Wind Mills since they say they kill more Birds than Planes , Hawks and Shooters do according too them .
The Greens are against Tranmisstion lines as well and are trying to stop them this minute in California .
Anybody wants more Energy just not in my back yard , Parks , Mountains ,shore lines and sky’s ?
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