Stormy weather: pro-wind campaigns suffer from a lack of good, freely available data.

Wind energy ought to be a shoo-in. Yes, the infrastructure costs a lot of money but the fuel is free and plentiful, turbines produce no emissions, and no mountaintops need to be removed. And unlike nuclear power, no long-term radioactive waste needs to be stored for millennia. Yet, bizarrely, small groups of committed neighbourhood activists continue to band together to save the environment from wind energy.

It’s perplexing, and for those involved in climate change activism, inordinately frustrating to see people who could be allies persistently turn themselves into enemies. I’d love to point my finger at some fossil-fuel funded meanie trying to kill public support for wind, but the picture is far more complex.

A small, cherry-picked, and often factually incorrect collection of data without context circulates on websites and in reports. Since most people have neither the time nor the technical education to tease out the realities from the misinformation, confusion over the health, economic, environmental and climate-related impacts of wind energy reigns just when we need clean energy sources most.

But shouldn’t it be obvious when people are using bad science? To someone without a technical background, no. The thicket of information available online both pro and con is bewildering and vast, a tangle of contradictory claims without end.

As Farhad Manjoo wrote in his 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, the inherent biases of human reasoning in an era of infinite information causes precisely this situation: instead of determining truth through examining methodology, testability, reproducibility, and peer review, the average person decides to trust the conclusions of whichever speaker appears to have the most impressive or trustworthy credentials.

“Calculating the Real Cost of Industrial Wind Power,” is a 2007 report by retired phytotherapist Keith Stelling that is routinely used to bolster anti-wind arguments. The claims he advances—that wind energy slaughters bats and birds, depresses property values, produces infrasound damaging to human health and destabilizes the grid while increasing carbon dioxide emissions—rest almost solely on the names of his sources. These include Audubon Society, American Bird Conservancy (both of whom support wind energy, contrary to his report), Renewable Energy Foundation and the National Research Council. Thanks to their borrowed credibility, Stelling’s report has played a role in municipal wind-energy moratoriums from Bruce County, Ontario to Austin, Texas.

But are his sources credible? For instance, despite their name, the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) is not on record as having supported a single renewable energy project, instead devoting their time and resources to discounting wind energy and mobilizing opposition. REF’s website contains only information about the downsides of wind energy, and until recently their mission statement included the necessity of “maintaining a non-confrontational relationship with fossil fuels.” Yet a single report by David White (former sales executive for Exxon and Esso Coal) for the REF is quoted in nine out of 27 pages in Stelling’s report.

A National Academy of Sciences report on wind energy is quoted in Stelling’s paper as having concluded that wind energy can “only” meet part of future American energy demand and is thus useless to combat climate change. The quote actually originated from a press release on the report by the Industrial Wind Action Group.

IWAG, for short, is a group “formed to counteract the misleading information promulgated by the wind energy industry and various environmental groups.” Their website contains mostly sympathetic newspaper stories and entirely lacks peer-reviewed or scientific research. When the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations published last year a scientific review of the health impacts of wind turbine noise on human health, for example, IWAG ignored it. But when, earlier this year, the Society for Wind Vigilance (a small anti-wind advocacy group) published a rebuttal [PDF] including complaints about being labelled “detractors” and an insistence that a proper study should include non-peer-reviewed research, IWAG included it in their research database.

The statistics, claims and sources used by Stelling and the IWAG are widely recycled by anti-wind groups to further their cause. One often-repeated factoid states that “international property consultant Savills” claims that wind farms reduce farmhouse property values by 30 percent. Tracking the quote to its source reveals it originated in a single letter from a single real estate agent in Britain to one of his clients. In one of the greater ironies of the wind energy debate, Savills promotes wind energy and has a sideline of planning and conducting environmental assessments of wind projects. Anti-wind information is widely available for free online and relatively simplistic, while the science debunking these claims is complex and often hidden behind an academic journal’s pay-walls. Scientists need to be paid for their work, and academic journals need to earn money to function and publish—but this makes it very difficult to promote good information.

What is the solution? Barring destroying the internet, returning to a less-knowledgeable time and restructuring the education system by next Wednesday, who knows? Manjoo’s thesis suggests that trust is the crux of the issue. No doubt, local anti-wind organizers distrust consultants and experts perceived to be on the proponent’s side via the proponent’s payroll. This is because proponents are required to pay for the assessment of their projects.

A third party is needed: a group that stands to benefit in no way from the construction of any particular wind project yet that can access, translate and communicate scientific and academic findings to multiple audiences. It would put the NIMBYs and the YIMBYs on equal footing, allowing the benefits or drawbacks of a given wind development to be debated sensibly. As the climate change clock ticks down we need community organizers to mobilize as effectively for wind power as others mobilize against it.

Wind turbines generating power at a 400 MW wind farm in Colorado. Conservationists are concerned about the impact of such developments on fragile ecosystems. Photo by UPI/Gary C. Caskey

Nuclear power has always been controversial, but even green power sources like wind and hydro meet resistance from locals.

When Nova Scotia entrepreneur Luciano Lisi unveiled a plan to blow 250 megawatts of wind-power into his province’s coal-based grid, he didn’t expect it to be this controversial. But his proposed wind-hydro hybrid project, involving 44 wind turbines (more than doubling the current number in the province), and a hydroelectric station near Lake Uist, Cape Breton, has raised the ire of land conservationists.

Their problem is with the hydro component, which allows for the storage of wind-power during off-peak hours. “It solves the important problem of wind variability,” Lisi says. Storing wind power makes the energy supplied more reliable, a major plus for green energy. Or it would be green—if the windmills weren’t sited in the middle of a thousand-hectare wetland.

For that reason, one of the province’s leading environmental groups, the Ecology Action Centre, offers only lukewarm support. “We are in favour of the proposed wind energy portion of the project,” an EAC statement says. The group is concerned that the hydro portion as originally proposed would destroy the wetland, leach methyl mercury into the lake (possibly poisoning drinking water), create “probable disastrous effects for the aquatic ecosystem,” and punch access roads through fragile wilderness.

The status of the Crown land in question is under negotiation with the Mi’kmaq First Nation. Every Mi’kmaq band in the province opposes the project, especially the nearby Eskasoni Reserve. Elder Albert Marshall, an award-winning environmentalist, has led the charge. “The Mi’kmaq are not anti development, but this project is nowhere near green,” Marshall says. He says First Nations communities need to be consulted on a development this big. “Our project will have no effect on the lake, that’s just idiots talking,” says Lisi, who hopes the project will achieve North America’s EcoLogo certification. “We will meet all regulations and requirements we are obliged to meet.”

But Marshall says the Mi’kmaq will protect the land. “This area has been used by Mi’kmaq for hunting, trapping, gathering, and medicines for a very long time,” he says.

Lisi will file his environmental impact assessment with the provincial and federal governments by mid-2009, and hopes to break ground late 2009 or early 2010. Marshall says litigation is a last-resort option “if they do not at least attempt to address our issues.”

Could wind turbines like these be harmful to your health? The scientific consensus is far from clear.

We love it when health concerns are taken seriously…

The last time you talked to your doctor about a strange set of symptoms, he or she probably didn’t write a book about it. But when Dr. Nina Pierpont of New York State got wind (pun intended) of dozens of residents living near wind turbines who reported tinnitus, headaches, insomnia, dizziness, heart palpitations, rage, and more, that’s exactly what she did. Her book, Wind Turbine Syndrome, originally scheduled to be self-published later this year, explores the disorder of the same name. Pierpont argues WTS’s symptoms are the predictable effects of infrasound (below the range of hearing) and low-frequency sound, while other experts say they are another manifestation of vibroacoustic disease.

Dr. Robert McMurtry, professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Western Ontario, estimates the number of people who could be affected by WTS range from 3 to 50 percent of the local population. He and others argue that a government agency should be set up to investigate complaints about turbine noise, and in the meantime a moratorium ought to be placed on their construction and operation until health effects are understood. Pierpont would agree: “Keep wind turbines at least two km away [from residences] on the flat,” she writes, “and 3.2 km away in mountains. These are minimum distances.”

…but it would be nice if it were based on better science

One problem: WTS so far is based more on gossip than on science. Pierpoint’s entire project resulted from interviews with 38 people from 10 families, all of whom approached her to complain. “They’re all basically anecdotal,” says Toronto acoustics expert Dr. Ramani Ramakrishnan. Pierpont’s research has not been published in peer-reviewed journals though it has found a home on the websites of dozens of anti-wind-energy groups, including Save the Bluffs, a Toronto group that opposes Toronto Hydro’s hopes to install wind turbines in Lake Ontario.

But while WTS is short on solid science, some work has been done on the impact of wind turbine noise. One 2007 study out of Sweden found that out of 754 residents who lived an average of 780 metres from turbines, the only issue significantly correlated with turbine noise was annoyance (and that at only about 4 percent).

In the meantime, the only clear thing is that we cannot wait. The urgency of climate change demands that we continue to build wind farms and learn and modify them as we go.