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.