appeals in Canada

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Comment by Kathy Sherman on September 10, 2015 at 10:28pm

Thank you for the post and thank you Carmen for a terrific presentation. Buried deep behind the headlines is that Health Canada consultants identified the signature blade pass pressure wave by microbarometer measurements over 10 km away. It was not a terrifically designed study and HC is able to bury it because the signal was only detectable under conditions that may not occur often on PEI, but occur very often on Fox Island, Massachusetts coastline, and in Ontario - extreme wind shear. Wind turbines are not designed to operate with a steep wind speed gradient from the top of rotation to the bottom, as it passes the tower. van den Berg showed that that was what accounted for sleep complaints amongst Dutch farmers when Germany erected the first "industrial" turbines across the border from them. Yet what Carmen didn't say is that the Canadian Academy called the evidence for sleep impacts "limited" and they included the Chapman nonsence about 'communicable' disorder' that is so heavily used and abused. It is highly likely that those wind farms that he claims created no problems were of the size that are grid-scale 43-47 m rotor. Rick James did an interesting analysis of the blade pass rate, and those 500-660 kW turbines have a blade pass rate above the "nauseogenic" frequency that Schomer identifies in his paper on Shirley WI. The Canadian Academy did also show the increase in sound power as turbines have grown larger. Those small grid scale turbines are below 100 and most turbines installed today are 106-110 dBA. Each 3 dB is a doubling of the acoustic energy. The Canadian Academy also acknowledged structural impacts of wind turbine emissions - the factor that presumably led Barb and her family to be more comfortable sleeping in a tent. I am a pharmacologist, not a pharmacist like Carmen, but when you look at the 'dose-response' curves for annoyance to IWT (and remember all but two of the turbines in the Swedish surveys were the "little" guys) you see a marked shift and that the curve for IWT rises more steeply than transport noise. The differences are more marked when expressed as Lden, as Europeans do - giving a 10 dB penalty to noise at night, 5 dB for evening. Wind turbines make noxious noise. Noise has been recognize as a public health hazard since 1930, and declared so by the surgeon general in the sixties, leading to federal legislation about noise and the right to be free of it along with Clean Air and Clean Water. The Canadian Academy also recognized the indirect, "non-auditory" effects of noise ala the WHO graphic and a publication by Basner et al in Lancet in 2013. The feds are finally investing in noise research in the US, albeit for air traffic, not the more invasive wind turbine noise.

Comment by alice mckay barnett on September 10, 2015 at 8:41pm

appeals

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