A Growing Source of Clean Energy, Wind Farms Are Blowing Ill Will Among Some Neighbors
Hal and Judy Graham
Photo by Lonny Kalfus
It is a bright mid-September day. Hal and Judy Graham are sitting in the living room of their restored 19th century farmhouse, which looks out over the still-green rolling hills near Cohocton, a rural community in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.
The pastoral view is punctuated by two 420-foot-high structures. The sleek towers, almost alien in appearance, are wind turbines. One of them stands 1,000 feet from the farmhouse, on a neighbor’s property. The second is 2,000 feet away on the Grahams’ own land.
On this afternoon in the late summer of 2009, the twin Goliaths are still. One was shut down last winter after a flurry of attempted repairs, and the other has unaccountably been shut down for just a couple of days. But the Grahams expect it to be only a temporary respite. When the winds are high and the turbines are spinning fast, “it sounds like a jet engine taking off in your backyard,” says Judy Graham. “Only it never stops.”
In 2004, the Grahams signed a contract that permitted a company named UPC Wind (since renamed First Wind) to construct and operate a wind turbine on their property as part of a 50-turbine “farm” that stretches across a number of properties. Later, the town of Cohocton passed an ordinance that effectively exempts leaseholders from any noise controls.
“They told us that the noise at 900 feet would be no louder than the hum of a refrigerator,” says Hal Graham. But he says the reality has been far different. “We can’t sleep. We can’t watch TV. This has been a disaster for us and our neighbors.”
Wind power is one of the current darlings of the movement to find alternative energy sources, and in 2008 the United States surpassed Germany as the world’s leading producer of electricity generated by wind. “With the right government policies, this cost-effective source of energy could provide at least 20 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030, create thousands of jobs, and revitalize farms and rural communities—without consuming any natural resource or emitting any pollution or greenhouse gases,” says the American Wind Energy Association on its website.
But an increasingly vocal minority says there is another, more sinister, side to wind power. They acknowledge that, from a distance, the towering sentinels seem to spin lightly and noiselessly in the wind. But closer up, they insist, turbines emit stomach-jarring whooshes and rumbles, and an impossible-to-ignore rhythmic hum that disrupts sleep and causes headaches, nausea and fatigue in some people.
Continue reading “The War of the Winds” online now in the February ABA Journal.
Note: This month’s CLE, “A Storm Brews Over Wind Power,” is on Feb. 17.
Free Online Streaming Audio is available starting Feb. 22. To register, go to abanet.org/cle. Past programs are available here
