Monday, December 14, 2009

Wasn't the only thing they ignored.

My views on wind farms are pretty straight forward, they don't work too well, they're expensive to maintain, uneconomic without government subsidies and highly environmentally unfriendly in that they sit on a huge concrete pad and also swat birds out of the sky with ease.
Well I have another reason now.

Telegraph. 
Wind turbine noise warnings were dismissed by civil servants

A warning about the health effects of noise from wind turbines was removed from a government study following pressure from civil servants.

Consultants recommended lowering night-time noise limits because the sounds made by spinning blades were enough to disrupt sleep patterns.
However, the advice, contained in a draft version of their 2006 report, was removed from the final submission which was eventually used in official guidance for local authorities ruling on planning applications from wind farm developers.
It means that hundreds of turbines at wind farms in Britain built since 2006 have been allowed to continue generating high levels of noise.
Evidence of the changed advice was uncovered after a two-year battle using the Freedom of Information Act by campaigners opposed to a wind turbine development close to their home at in mid-Devon.
One of those campaigners, Mike Hulme, said: “This proves what we have been saying all along, that the noise guidelines should be reviewed. They haven’t changed substantially since 1997, in which time the design of turbines has changed and the number of wind farms has increased.
“Turbines used to be about 50 feet and now they are closer to 400 feet.
"Residents are afraid to complain to their council because the problem is then in the public domain and it becomes impossible to sell their house."
So, it turns out they're bloody noisy too, though why civil servants thought to cover this up is interesting. I can only put this down to one of two things. Either the civil servants were raving greenies, or that they were following EU guidelines on carbon reduction and didn't want to bother the people elected to lead us with that sort of trivial detail.
I frequently have this argument with people all over the net including my kids but they just don't get it, these things are not green, they aren't economic and they plain don't work on windless days as well as too windy ones. They see the facts, but it's like they have blinkers on when it comes to the term environmentally friendly and don't check the facts that they very clearly are not!

2 annotations:

subrosa said...

They definitely are noisy things QM. A friend of mine lives in a village some miles from a wind farm and the humming really has become a problem for the whole community.

It's taken them a great deal of time and effort to even have their concerns heard.

JuliaM said...

And yet, the EU is seeking to interfere with the sound levels on....pertsonal MP3 players!

You really can't make it up any more, can you?