Wind turbines have no impact on house prices

|
Wind farm
Ten-year survey of house sales in US finds wind turbines have no negative affect on market price despite public fears
 

Wind turbines have no widespread impact on house prices, according to the largest ever survey of residential properties in the US.

The analysis, funded by the US Department of Energy, looked at the sale of almost 7,500 homes situated within 10 miles of 24 wind farms in 9 different US states over a ten-year period. The closest home was 800 feet from a wind turbine.

Rather than relying on homeowner or estate agent surveys the study looked at actual market sale price.

It found 'no evidence of widespread impacts'.

'Neither the view of wind energy facilities, nor the distance of the home to those facilities, was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes,' said report author Ben Hoen of the Berkeley National Laboratory that conducted the study.

The report's authors acknowledged that previous studies had found a link between house sale price and conventional power plants or high voltage transmission lines, but said the same could not be said of wind energy plants.

'Though the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, their frequency is too small to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact,' he added.

UK study

The findings come after a smaller study conducted in the UK by the Royal Institute of Charters Surveyors (RICS) and Oxford Brookes University in 2007.

It looked at a number of wind farm locations in Cornwall and found that the evidence suggested the 'threat' of a wind farm may have a more significant impact than the actual presence of one.

Terraced and semi-detached houses, especially those located within a mile of a wind farm, showed some impact on sale prices. But the effect was much less or non-existent for detached houses.

Useful links
Impact of Wind farms on US Residential Property Values
RICS and Oxford Brookes study on wind farms in UK

READ MORE...
NEWS
Geo-engineering: climate solution or dangerous distraction?
The launch of the Royal Society's report on geo-engineering raises the spectre of a quick-fix solution to climate change. But is it that simple?
HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
CASE STUDY: setting up a community micro-hydroelectric project
The UK’s first community-funded hydroelectric scheme, Torrs Hydro is generating green energy as well as interest in H2O power. Claire Baylis meets the man behind it
INVESTIGATION
Power On - Wind
The UK has been described as the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of wind, with some 50 TWh of onshore and at least 450 TWh of offshore power available every year, well in excess of our current electricity demand.
HOW TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
CASE STUDY: Alan Simpson MP - my super energy-efficient house
Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South, is on a mission. ‘We can’t survive this century unless we change fundamentally the built environment and move from thinking of buildings as consumers of energy, to thinking of them as generators of electricity.' Ben Willis meets the rarest of breeds, an MP who’s walking the talk.
NEWS ANALYSIS
Nuclear gets fast-track, but renewables left with little
New Government planning rules will shorten the approval process for big power projects like nuclear plants, but do little for the local renewables sector

More from this author