Wind Turbines Have No Impact on Nearby Home Values, New Study Confirms

Wind turbine opponents do not like looking at wind turbines. But in the face of strong public support for non-polluting, locally-produced clean energy, that's not an effective argument, so they make outrageous claims about health impacts and property values.

Study after study has proven claims about health impacts are false, and now a new study confirms nearby wind turbines have no impact on property values:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) analyzed more than 50,000 home sales near 67 wind facilities in 27 counties across nine U.S. states, yet was unable to uncover any impacts to nearby home property values.

“This is the second of two major studies we have conducted on this topic and in both studies [using two different datasets] we find no statistical evidence that operating wind turbines have had any measureable impact on home sales prices,” says Ben Hoen, the lead author of the new report. [...]

“Although there have been claims of significant property value impacts near operating wind turbines that regularly surface in the press or in local communities, strong evidence to support those claims has failed to materialize in all of the major U.S. studies conducted thus far”, says Hoen. “Moreover, our findings comport with the large set of studies that have investigated other potentially similar disamenities, such as high voltage transmission lines, land fills, and noisy roads, which suggest that widespread impacts from wind turbines would be either relatively small or non-existent.”

Distant wind turbines are at most a minor inconvenience, something you might not pick as part of your new home in a perfect world, but one that wouldn't deter you from buying a home in the real world.

Look at Falmouth, Fox's favorite example of the WIND MENACE - home prices are up in the last year. And they're flat in other places with wind turbines like Fairhaven, Hull, Kingston and Scituate, a far cry from the outrageous claims of home price decimation made by clean energy opponents.