Windmills don’t sink land value - Providence Journal Op-ed

WENDY WILLIAMS

LOS ANGELES

DO PROPERTY VALUES fall when wind turbines appear nearby?

Ever since the 130-turbine Nantucket Sound wind-power project known as Cape Wind was proposed in 2001, opponents have asserted that Cape Cod’s shoreline properties would depreciate in value. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once justified his opposition to Cape Wind on the grounds of environmental justice: Middle- and low-income homeowners would pay higher property taxes because wealthy shoreline homeowners would pay less after the projected depreciation.

An October 2003 study, produced by David G. Tuerck’s Beacon Hill “Institute” and financed by the private family foundation of a major Cape Wind opponent — EMC Corp. co-founder Richard J. Egan — seemed to buttress Kennedy’s reasoning: “It is estimated that property values in the six affected towns would fall by 4 percent. This represent a loss of $1.35 billion in property values, or almost twice the cost of the windmill project.”

Holy Moses! That’s a lot of money to lose.

But how did Tuerck’s organization arrive at this figure?

There’s the rub. A team of Tuerck’s surveyors showed 501 homeowners in the six towns around Nantucket Sound photo simulations of what the offshore wind project would allegedly look like from their homes. Then the team asked homeowners if they thought their properties might drop in value if Cape Wind were built.

Sampling a group that has been constantly assaulted with doom-and-gloom anti-wind-farm hysteria for several years is unlikely, scientifically speaking, to yield a useful result.

Even so, 79 percent of interviewees said they did not expect a drop in home value — a fact not mentioned in the institute’s summary and study analysis. Here’s what the conclusion said: “Homeowners said that the wind mill project would depress property values….”

To find out about these nay-sayers, you have to read the specific survey questions and responses.

Only 100 of those surveyed said they expected a drop in property values. How do you get from there — a few people who say their property values might drop some time in the future — to the institute’s ultimate conclusion that Cape Cod property values would drop by an estimated $1.35 billion.

Luckily for Tuerck, peer scientists never juried this study, so the Beacon Hill team did not have to answer that particularly salient question.

So what’s the real story?

Several years ago, Ben Hoen, a Bard Center on Environmental Policy graduate student, looked at actual home sales near a 20-turbine, 30-megawatt wind project in central New York State. He examined 679 home sales occurring within five miles of the project over a decade. He found no evidence of a drop in property values.

Hoen, however, wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to extend his study to obtain a much larger sample size. Eventually he spoke with Ryan Wiser, a scientist with the Electricity Markets and Policy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, who only recently testified before a U.S. Senate committee on the energy bill being debated in Congress.

Wiser’s specialty is cost/benefit issues related to renewable energy. He hired Hoen as the principle investigator on what the pair intends to be the first scientifically rigorous, juried and, ultimately, published study on the actual, documented effects of wind turbines on property values. This study will be financed not by a private “foundation” with an ax to grind, but with public money.

The Hoen and Wiser study will have a huge sample size — 3,500 to 5,000 home sales near eight to 10 operating wind-turbine projects.

Earlier this month, at the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference, Hoen presented the team’s preliminary findings. The study is not quite half done. After looking at four sites with a total sample size of 2,195 home sales, the Lawrence Berkeley team found “no statistical evidence that homes within four to seven miles of a facility are affected adversely.”

The team is now moving on to the next stage, looking at another four to six sites. Said Hoen: “These are rigorous results. The model seems to be working very well.”

Wiser emphasizes the importance of scientific rigor. “All that’s existed to date has been hearsay,” he says. “Maybe it’s informed hearsay, maybe it’s uninformed. Talking to homeowners who have never seen a wind farm, it’s hard for the imagination to really credibly tell you what that thing might look like.”

Wiser expects the study to be completed by the end of the year. Results may be available in early 2008.

Wendy Williams, a Cape Cod-based science writer, is co-author, with Robert Whitcomb, of Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound.