Wind turbines on a hill above a farm home in southeastern Washington state in November.
American homeowners may have been unfairly tarred with the NIMBY brush, with new research showing that wind turbines have a far smaller effect on house prices across the country than previously feared.
Using data from 300 million home sales and their proximity to 60,000 wind turbines, researchers found an impact of just 1% in value for houses that have a view of turbines within 6 miles.
The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that only houses within 1.2 miles of a turbine saw their value significantly affected, at up to 8%. Beyond 1.2 miles, the impact rapidly tailed off.
The researchers note that fewer than 250,000 buildings in the U.S. sit within 2.5 miles of a wind turbine, with 8.5 million homes and structures within 6 miles of one.
"Our research responds to some arguments of local opposition against wind turbines, the classic 'not in my backyard' problem that is a hot topic not only in the U.S. but also in Europe and Germany," says Leonie Wenz, a co-author of the study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), who suggests the findings could also be used as a basis for compensating affected homeowners.
"Our study also underlines that these impacts have been small in the last two decades, and that we can expect them to become even less of an issue in the future,” she adds.
The U.S. is investing heavily in renewable energy generation, with the Department of Energy describing wind power as "one of the fastest growing and lowest-cost sources of electricity in America." But even as the Inflation Reduction Act helps incentivize the development of clean energy generation across the country, negative perceptions about wind turbines have in some areas led to strong local opposition to wind projects, causing them to be abandoned.
Notably, the study is the first of its kind to take into account not just of the proximity of homes to turbines, but whether the turbines were within sight of those homes. That's significant, as Wei Guo of the Italian Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), and a co-author of the study, explains.
“Unlike previous studies, we did not only consider proximity, but also the actual visibility of wind turbines,” Guo says. "We calculated whether you can see the turbine, or whether there is a mountain in the way, for example, and if so, how the house value changes compared to other houses in the same area where residents cannot see the wind turbine.”
That consideration reveals an important detail: any negative economic effect of a wind turbine was found to decrease rapidly as distance from the turbine increased. Furthermore, the researchers say, the effect diminished over time, with any reduction in value peaking at three years following the installation of the turbine, and subsequently falling away.
“What really surprised me is that the house value bounces back to the original price over the years," says Maximilian Auffhammer, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study co-author, who also notes that for turbines installed after 2017, any negative effect was "indistinguishable from zero." In sum, Auffhammer says, the findings show that "the impact of wind turbines on house prices is much smaller than generally feared."
