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
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