January 11th, 2010 by
EBR_EBdaily - The U.S. Department of Energy's
(DOE's) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with funding from
the DOE's Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program, has concluded
after intensive research that wind turbines have very little effect
on property values.
This is an important conclusion, because
one of the biggest criticisms of wind power has been that the
turbines are unsightly and will cause properties that they are on
or near to lose considerable value.
The Laboratory used eight-point hedonic
statistical analysis to analyze home and property sales prices of
7500 real estate transactions entered into from 1996 through 2007
which involved the buying and selling of real estate within a 10
mile radius of an existing wind turbine array. One home was only
800 feet away from a wind turbine facility.
The conclusion was that while it's probable
that there are some people who would never wish to have to look out
on a wind turbine array, leading some small percentage of property
values going down, there is no significant negative impact at all
on the larger real estate value picture concerning situations where
wind turbine arrays are within sight of a property.
With ever-increasing community interest in
the installation of wind turbine arrays, including in some coastal
areas, in the United States, this kind of research is vitally
important.
Human beings need beauty as well as practicality-which is why you
don't usually see well-off people living close to a factory, even
though that factory is doing something very valuable in the
practical sense.
See Related Report: New Build Wind Pricing Interactive
Model