“More and more people are describing their lives as unbearable when they are directly exposed to the acoustic and optical effects of wind farms.

There are reports of people being signed off sick and unfit for work, there is a growing number of complaints about symptoms such as pulse irregularities and states of anxiety, which are known from the effects of infrasound (sound of frequencies below the normal audible limit).

Extract from The Darmstadt Manifesto



DEFRA recently commissioned research by Casella Stanger into the hazards of 'infrasound' - frequencies of 20 cycles per second or less (well below the lowest note on a piano).

It identifies infrasound as a source of stress-related illness, and cites wind turbines amongst the common hazards.

As yet, Environmental Health Officers are ill equipped to measure levels and effects of infrasound pollution.



A criminal suit has been allowed to go forward in Ireland against the owner and operator of a wind plant for noise violations of their environmental law.



Also in Ireland, a developer has been forced to compensate a homeowner for loss of property value, and many people have had their tax valuation reduced.



In the Lake District of northwest England, a group has sued the owner and operator of the Askam wind plant, claiming it is ruining their lives.



In Vermont, the director of Energy Efficiency for the Department of Public Service has said that the noise from the 11 550-KW Searsburg turbines is significant a mile away. Residents 1.5 and even 3 miles downwind in otherwise quiet rural areas suffer significant noise pollution.



Communities in Germany, Wales, and Ireland claim that even 3,000 feet away, the noise is significant.



The noise of a wind plant in Ireland was measured in 2002 at 60 dB 1 km (3,280 ft) upwind. The subaural low-frequency noise was above 70 dB (3 times as loud).



A German study in 2003 found significant noise levels 1 mile away from a 2-year-old wind farm of 17 1.8-MW turbines, especially at night. In mountainous areas the sound echoes over larger distances.



The Danish government has cancelled plans for three offshore windfarms planned for 2008 and has scheduled the withdrawal of subsidies from existing sites. Development of onshore wind plants in Denmark has effectively stopped.



Spain began withdrawing subsidies in 2002.



Germany is considering ending subsidies to wind power.



Switzerland also is cutting subsidies as too expensive for the lack of significant benefit.



It is reported that California will no longer seek new installations and will instead upgrade those that already exist (which also face the problem of high rates of bird deaths).



Ireland in December 2003 halted all new wind-power connections to the national grid, because of the serious instability they cause.



Denmark (population 5.3 million) has over 6,000 turbines that produced electricity equal to 19% of what the country used in 2002.

Yet no conventional power plant has been shut down.

Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. They cannot simply be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises, and such inefficient operation would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary "greenhouse" gas), as well as cost more.



The Danish government has stopped erecting onshore turbines because of the health problems associated with noise.



Dr Bridget Osborne, a doctor in Moel Maelogan, north Wales, where three turbines were erected in 2002, has presented a paper to the Royal College of General Practitioners in which she reported a marked increase of depression suffered by local people



Research by Dr Amanda Harry showed that all but one of the 14 people living near the Bears Down wind farm in Cornwall had experienced increased incidents of headaches, and 10 said they had problems sleeping and suffered from anxiety.



According to Dr Harry, a local GP in the area, there was a range of reported symptoms from headaches, migraines, nausea, dizziness, palpitations and tinnitus to sleep disorders, stress anxiety and depression.



New medical studies indicate that onshore wind farms can be a health hazard to people living nearby because of the low-frequency noise.

Low-frequency noise travels further than audible noise; it is ground borne and felt through vibrations, which can resonate with the human body.



According to a report by Dr Geoff Leventhall, a fellow of the Institute of Physics and Institute of Acoustics, 'Low-frequency noise causes extreme distress to a number of people who are sensitive to its effects.'



The Countryside Agency has called for turbines to be sited away from bridleways - a distance of three times the height of the turbines normally and four times the height of the turbines near National Trails (height to blade tip) - because noise and flicker can startle horses and endanger their riders and because of risk from thrown ice.

The British Horse Society has expressed similar concerns.



The civic authorities in Palm Springs, USA, as early as the late 1980s made developers move turbines to a distance of half a mile from the highway for safety reasons.



Apart from the danger of blades becoming detached or disintegrating, there is a risk that lumps of ice can form on them in still cold weather and then be thrown significant distances when the wind gets up and the blades begin to move.

"In those areas where icing of blades does occur, fragments of ice might be released from the blades when the machine is started."

Professor Otfried Wolfrum, professor of applied geodesy at Darmstadt University wrote on this subject: "Some ice layers 150mm thick have been detected and their mass has been as high as 20 - 23 kg/m (proceedings BORKAS 11Helsinki 1994, p219)"



‘Wind energy is not as clean as its proponents would have us believe.

It is an industrial development and as such causes degradation of the environments where the turbines are sited.

The proposed environmental benefits of windfarming .. will only come from the very large-scale use of turbines.

One environmental problem will simply be replaced by another’.

[Dr John Hedger at the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Wales Aberystwyth].



‘My long-established view is that wind-generated power is an expensive form of energy.

It can only provide a very small fraction of the output required to meet total energy needs and it unavoidably makes an unacceptable intrusion into the landscape’.

[Neil Kinnock, EU Commissioner].



France concluded that

‘To use wind turbines along with other conventional energy producing systems to cover for the lack of wind periods is a particularly wasteful way of trying to reduce gas emissions’.

[The Scotsman, 30 January 2002, quoting the French Parliamentary Office for the evaluation of scientific and technological choices].



Over 100 leading academics in Germany concluded:

‘The negative effects of wind energy is as much underestimated as its contribution to the statistics is overestimated.

Falling property values reflect the perceived deterioration in quality of life – not just in areas close to turbines, but even all over Schleswig-Holstein.

Wind energy is therefore of no significance whatever either in the statistics for energy or for those of pollution and greenhouse gases’.

[The Darmstadt Manifesto: A Paper on Wind Energy by the German Professors Initiative Group].



Denmark is often held up as ‘the’ windfarm country, but has amongst the most expensive electricity in Europe, and the new government has placed a moratorium on further developments whilst it re-assesses their worth.

Their industry minister, Bent Bendsen, is deeply concerned with the social and industrial consequences of building more turbines.

[The Scotsman, 30 January 2002].



Residents living 500 m and more from the park have reacted strongly to the noise; (and) residents up to 1900m distance expressed annoyance

“Effects of the wind profile at night on wind turbine sound” (Journal of Sound and Vibration, 277 (2004), G. P. Van den Berg, a physicist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands



From the point of view of the national economy the development of wind energy is far from being the "success story" it is often claimed to be. On the contrary, it puts a strain on the economy as it is still unprofitable with a low energy yield on the one hand and high investment costs on the other.”

Extract from The Darmstadt Manifesto