With the rush on for so-called renewable energy, you would think that there would be heaps of studies on possible side-effects of wind farms such as possible health effects of these monstrosities. Some years ago while I still believed that the ABC was capable of producing genuine information on science, there was a commentator on the Science Show who put down all the complaints to psychology, fear and climate denial.
Apparently there has now been a “world first” study on a tiny sample of houses that has discovered that even several kilometres away there are audible pulses of sound which must have some potential effect when it’s there constantly. Still, somebody has to take a shot to save the planet.
Jo Nov reports:
Finally “world first” study on nine houses shows wind towers make pulsing noise for 3.5 km
Generic wind turbine near farm. Photo: @gonz_ddl
Finally, a study looks at data on nine houses within ten kilometers of an old (probably small) wind turbine. What’s amazing about this research is not the result but that this study is so tiny, yet it’s still a “world first”.
There are already probably around400,000 wind turbinesinstalled around the world.* So you might think that there would have been scores of studies involving hundreds of people and followed up for a year or two. They would have looked at the effect of wind turbines upwind, downwind, side wind, in low wind, high wind, and at different times of day. They’d check for altered sleep patterns, lack of deep sleep, REM sleep, cognitive performance, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and school marks. Dream on. It’s like everything with climate change — who needs data?
Renewables are a$300 billion annual global industry. This work was done with a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant. Where is the precautionary principle when we need it?
Can wind turbines disturb sleep? Research finds pulsing audible in homes up to 3.5km away
Nicola Hasham,Sydney Morning Herald
…the first results from ongoing Flinders University research into turbine noise and sleep found that low-frequency pulsing from a South Australian wind farm was audible about 16 per cent of the time inside homes up to 3.5 kilometres from a turbine, including 22 per cent of the time at night. The noise was audible 24 per cent of the time outside the homes. Recordings detected what complainants commonly describe as a pulsating, thumping or rumbling sound. The noise is technically known as amplitude modulation, and relates to a change in noise level that occurs approximately once per second as the turbine blade rotates. Field data was recorded at nine homes within 8.8 kilometres of the wind farm. Microphones were placed inside and outside homes and recorded almost 18,000 10-minute samples between 2012 and 2015. The data was recently analysed and the results published online last month in the Journal of Sound and Vibration.
In 2016 the research team was awarded a $1.4 million National Health and Medical Research Council grant for a separate wind farm noise study including lab tests and sleep measurement
If the world put just 0.5% of the annual “renewables investment” into researching the health effects that would be $15m a year.
There have been almost no studies into the health impact of wind farms. Remember the one in 2014 in Australia which was also a world first, andinvolved an eight week study on six people in three houses.It was a tiny study too — why we haven’t done this one hundred times bigger? Are we afraid of what the results might show?
Read the rest of the article here
New Life Narrabri 