Sponsor
This work was funded by the Wind Energy Technologies Office of the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Published In
Environment International
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Subjects
Wind power--Research--United States
Abstract
As wind turbines and the number of wind projects scale throughout the world, a growing number of individuals might be affected by these structures. For some people, wind turbine sounds and their effects on the landscape can be annoying and could even prompt stress reactions. This comparative study analyzed a combined sample of survey respondents from the U.S., Germany and Switzerland. It utilized a newly developed assessment scale (ASScale) to reliably characterize these stress-impacted individuals living within populations near turbines. Findings indicate low prevalence of annoyance, stress symptoms and coping strategies. Noise annoyance stress (NASScale) was negatively correlated with the perceptions of a lack of fairness of the wind project's planning and development process, among other subjective variables. Objective indicators, such as the distance from the nearest turbine and sound pressure level modeled for each respondent, were not found to be correlated to noise annoyance. Similar result patterns were found across the European and U.S. samples.
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DOI
10.1016/j.envint.2019.105090
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/29431
Citation Details
Hübner, G., Pohl, J., Hoen, B., Firestone, J., Rand, J., Elliott, D., & Haac, R. (2019). Monitoring annoyance and stress effects of wind turbines on nearby residents: A comparison of US and European samples. Environment international, 132, 105090.
Description
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.