The study examined 7,500 home sales near wind farms, which the Laboratory called "the most comprehensive and data-rich analysis to date on the potential impact of U.S. wind projects on residential property values."
“Neither the view of wind energy facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes,” says report author Ben Hoen, a consultant to Berkeley Lab. “No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back – no evidence of widespread impacts.”
According to the report, "The analysis revealed that home sales prices are very sensitive to the overall quality of the scenic vista from a property, but that a view of a wind power facility did not demonstrably impact sales prices." In other words, turbines are scenic? We knew that.
AWEA STATEMENT ON NEW U.S. ENERGY DEPARTMENT STUDY REVEALING WIND PROJECTS HAVE NO IMPACT ON PROPERTY VALUES
The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) today issued the following statement by AWEA CEO Denise Bode following the release of a study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concluding that proximity to wind energy facilities does not have a pervasive or widespread adverse effect on the property values of nearby homes:
“The conclusions of this study could not be more definitive—wind farms do not weaken property values. These important research findings offer good news for those communities that might be considering the location of wind farms nearby. Wind energy has multiple benefits: it creates jobs, reduces greenhouse gases, and delivers direct economic benefits to rural communities. Now we can also say that wind energy has no impact on property values.”
The DOE-sponsored study examined 7,500 single-family property sales between 1996 and 2007 in order to record values from before the announcement of a wind energy facility to a period after it was built and operating.
For more information on the Energy Department study, go to http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/re-pubs.html.
Abstract
With wind energy expanding rapidly in the U.S. and abroad, and with an increasing number of communities considering wind power development nearby, there is an urgent need to empirically investigate common community concerns about wind project development.
The concern that property values will be adversely affected by wind energy facilities is commonly put forth by stakeholders. Although this concern is not unreasonable, given property value impacts that have been found near high voltage transmission lines and other electric generation facilities, the impacts of wind energy facilities on residential property values had not previously been investigated thoroughly.
The present research collected data on almost 7,500 sales of singlefamily homes situated within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine different U.S. states.
The conclusions of the study are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, as well as both repeat sales and sales volume models. The various analyses are strongly consistent in that none of the models uncovers conclusive evidence of the existence of any widespread property value impacts that might be present in communities surrounding wind energy facilities.
Specifically, neither the view of the wind facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities is found to have any consistent, measurable, and statistically significant effect on home sales prices.
Although the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been or could be negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, they are either too small and/or too infrequent to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact.
eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-2829e.pdf
