National Survey of Attitudes of Wind Power Project Neighbors
National Survey of Attitudes of Wind Power Project Neighbors
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Background and Motivation
The installed wind power capacity in the United States through the end of 2016 was capable of supplying approximately 6.2% of the nation’s electricity demand from about 60,000 utility-scale turbines (Wiser & Bolinger, 2017).1 Through 2015, almost 1.4 million homes were within 5 miles (8 kilometers) of a U.S. utility-scale wind power project, and each year in the preceding 10 years, turbines placed in large projects (projects with more than 60 turbines) were closer to homes at a rate of approximately 150 feet (46 meters) per year on average.2
Experts predict continued reductions in the cost of wind energy (Wiser et al., 2017) and additional wind project deployment in the years ahead (Mai et al. 2017). Achieving this continued deployment will require coordination and cooperation with the communities and community members in which the wind power projects will be located, including local authorities, citizens, landowners, businesses, and non-governmental organizations. These individuals and organizations often look to other communities with wind power projects to understand the potential costs and benefits of moving forward with such a project.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to lead a 4-year project collecting data from a broad-based and representative sample of individuals living near U.S. wind power projects. The aim was to widen the understanding of how U.S. communities are reacting to the deployment of wind turbines, and to provide insights to those communities considering wind projects. Berkeley Lab led this research in collaboration with University of Delaware, Portland State University, the Medical School or Hamburg (Germany), RSG Inc., and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Resulting Journal Papers
The results from this project are contained in five separate papers. Click on the headings below for paper abstracts, citations, and a download link.
Webinar Series
A Berkeley Lab 4-part webinar series, Understanding Wind Project Neighbors through a National Survey of Attitudes, covering four of the five projects shown above was held in early 2018. Links to recordings of each of those webinars are below:
Overall Analysis of Attitudes of 1,700 Wind Power Project Neighbors (January 30th, 2018)
Webinar recording link
Wind Power Project Planning Process Fairness and Attitudes ( February 13th, 2018)
Webinar recording link
Predicting Audibility of and Annoyance to Wind Power Project Sounds Using Modeled Sound ( February 27th, 2018)
Webinar recording link
Comparing Strongly Annoyed Individuals with Symptoms near U.S. Turbines to Those in Surveyed European Communities ( March 13, 2018)
Webinar recording link
Data Availability
A version of the analysis dataset with no personally identifiable information is available to other researchers by filling out this request form. A copy of the codebook for those data is available here and a copy of the mail survey instrument is available here.
If you wish to use the data please cite them as follows:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2018) National Survey of Attitudes of Wind Power Project Neighbors Data [Retrieved <add date here>] https://emp.lbl.gov/projects/wind-neighbor-survey
More Information
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1 Some of the approximately 60,000 turbines are now more than 15 years old and small, in terms of total height and nameplate capacity, compared with the turbines currently being installed.
2 To determine this, we use a dataset of 1.29 million homes within 5 miles of all U.S. wind projects with turbines larger than 364 feet and 1.5 MW (n = 29,848 turbines across 604 projects), which were installed between 2004 and 2014. We regress distance to the nearest home from any turbine in the project on year of installation, finding each year during this period, on average, turbines were approximately 150 feet (46 meters) closer to homes (p-value = 0.000).