Scientific study says wind turbines have little effect on housing prices but…

New report sees 25 % loss when you’re 1.5 km away

Farmers Forum staff

OTTAWA — A recent ballyhooed study claims that industrial-scale wind turbines have only a “small and diminishing” impact on property values over time, but critics are panning the study as a statistical sleight of hand.

Ottawa real estate and valuation expert Norris Wilson reported in March that the highly publicized scientific study was salted with data from house sales between 3 and 10 km away from turbines, diluting losses from home sales within 2 km of a wind turbine. “Those are the properties that may be affected significantly,” Wilson wrote in his report, which was commissioned by Wind Concerns Ontario, a lobby group vehemently opposed to wind turbine development, and that commissioned his critique of the highly-publicized study in the academic journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wilson took issue with the study’s contention that it looked at 300-million property sales in the U.S. Wilson busts that claim, writing that the involved database involved only 8.5-million home sales within 10 km of wind turbines.

Consequently, the scientific study concluded an average property value loss of 1.12 per cent for homes within visual proximity to wind turbines. That’s a $25-billion loss spread over millions of properties. But Wilson pointed out that the biggest losses are borne by the 250,000 home sales within 1.5 km (of turbines), which reflects a loss of $100,000 per property or about 25 % of property value on average, Wilson reported.

In a blog post, Wind Concerns Ontario also took the scientific study authors to task for using the word “NIMBY” (Not in my backyard) to describe turbine opponents. “Too bad they fell on their own swords and actually proved what they said was not the case. Wind turbines do cause property value loss. And it’s not nothing.”