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Comment by afpx | Hacker News Reader

Except when you live nearby them....

I am 100% in support of renewables. However, I also know several home owners near wind-rich areas. And, the noise pollution from the turbines is awful. Unfortunately, my friends are poor (as typical) and have little say in the matter.

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Out of curiosity, what make/model are they? I rent some land in the middle of a wind farm, one of which one is standing on that particular ground, and I don't know what there really is to hear.

I expect it is a particular manufacturer or unit, and quite possibly one built a long time ago, that is causing the trouble that some experience. But I haven't been able to track down which one. Sadly, it seems most just see 'tall white things with blades' and think they are all identical, which makes getting reliable information fairly difficult.

Living near coal mines, coal or nuclear power plants isn't great either.

Significantly fewer people need to live near them due to energy density.

But a noise when it's windy is 1000 times better than polluted air and water, coal produces more radiation than nuclear, the mercury in fish comes from coal.

I'm surprised you can be out of shadow distance of a turbine and still hear it. If you're inside the shadow distance, you have bigger problems.

Just in Holland and Germany alone there are over 1000 separate citizen groups trying to get compensation for those suffering from the noise. You could start to suspect that the problems seem to be more serious than just something inside the shadow distance.

Just out of curiosity here's the noise profile (spectrogram) of a turbine at 1,37 km (0.85 miles), measured inside a home, where we can see the base frequency and several harmonic multiples:

http://i.imgur.com/m31hhR5.png

Here's the same turbine at 5km (3.1 miles), again inside a house, where the turbine is shut off at 11 a.m.:

http://i.imgur.com/pRJeunj.png

As we can see this low frequency noise can travel very long distances, and when you have wind farms with multiple turbines they can even create interference patterns, that could amplify the problems further.

The charts extend only up to ~5Hz and the intensity already decreased a lot. Human hearing range commonly doesn't start until 20Hz. Do you have charts including higher frequencies?

I already asked the grandparent, but received no response[1]. What make/model generated that profile? And how does it compare to the same measuring setup used on other units? While they may all look the same at a distance, you can find vast design differences between them when you start to look closely. It seems unlikely that they would all generate the exact same noise.

To put it another way, a car on the NASCAR circuit looks a lot like a road suitable car anyone can buy at the dealer's lot, but the sound is completely different. It pays to be specific.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174426

Sorry about that! I only get a few minutes a week to look at HN :(

Anyway, I'm not sure of the model. abut, I could try to find out. Let me know.

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