Woodcut by Paul Bloomer (click for link)Yesterday was spent at the first annual conference of Scotland Against Spin, the umbrella group for Scottish anti-windfarm groups. This was top quality stuff, with an excellent array of speakers with some amazing stories to tell. I'm going to pass some of these on over the next few days.
The theme of the conference was the cost of wind power, so much of the focus was on economics, but the final speaker focused on noise, and had presumably been added to give a bit of relief from the numbers.
Mike Stigwood is an acoustician. An ex-environmental health officer he now runs his own consultancy and has developed something of a specialism in wind farm noise and has uncovered some major problems with the official limits on noise levels. As I understand it, the guidelines are measuring average levels of noise, while wind farms emit sounds that ramp up and down as the turbines rotate. This "amplitude modulation" makes the sound particularly obtrusive and the fact that the rhythm changes constantly makes it hard to ignore too. You can get a sense of this at the example here (although note the caveats). After the talk people in the audience described having to abandon parts of their homes because of the constant drone, and Stigwood put out a call for people willing to testify about what they were going through.
We heard that trying to get a nuisance order is nigh on impossible, because it takes years and if there is any likelihood of success the windfarm owner can escape justice simply by transferring the ownership of the windfarm to a new corporate entity. If true, this is shocking. There was also mention of the government buying up problem windfarms to keep them running.
We also heard that Stigwood's attempts to argue his case in the academic literature have been rejected or edited into meaninglessness. We heard how the Institute of Acoustics working group appointed to look into the guidelines was packed with people who would give the right answer. These were all painfully familiar stories, further evidence, as if any were needed, of how inadequate academia is for informing policy decisions.