America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate

America’s Wind Energy Potential Triples in New Estimate

By Alexis Madrigal
February 19, 2010 | 1:31 pm | Categories: Energy

The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources.

Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/filter_detail.asp?itemid=2542">new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours.

Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.html">generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available.

Though new and better data was used to create the assessment, the big jump in potential generation reflects technological change in wind machines more than fundamental new knowledge about our nation’s windscape.

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Specifically the President’s FY 2011 budget request for the Department of Energy:

• Positions the United States to be the global leader in the new energy economy by developing new ways to produce and use clean and renewable energy.
• Maintains effective nuclear deterrence while working to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world within four years.
• Engages in cross-disciplinary scientific approaches to our energy and national priorities – including innovative and transformative research at DOE’s National Laboratories.
• Expands the use of clean, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal while supporting the Administration’s goal to develop a smart, strong, and secure electricity grid.
• Promotes innovation in the renewable and nuclear energy sectors through the use of expanded loan guarantee authority.
• Advances responsible environmental management by cleaning up hazardous, radioactive legacy waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.

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Berkeley Lab Study Finds No Widespread Impact of Wind Power Projects on Surrounding Residential Property Values in the U.S.

December 02, 2009

Over 30,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity are installed across the United States and an increasing number of communities are considering new wind power facilities. Given these developments, there is an urgent need to empirically investigate typical community concerns about wind energy and thereby provide stakeholders involved in the wind project siting process a common base of knowledge. A major new report released today by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluates one of those concerns, and finds that proximity to wind energy facilities does not have a pervasive or widespread adverse effect on the property values of nearby homes.

The new report, funded by the DOE, is based on site visits, data collection, and analysis of almost 7,500 single-family home sales, making it 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.”

The team of researchers for the project collected data on homes situated within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine different U.S. states; the closest home was 800 feet from a wind facility. Each home in the sample was visited to collect important on-site information such as whether wind turbines were visible from the home. The home sales used in the study occurred between 1996 and 2007, spanning the period prior to the announcement of each wind energy facility to well after its construction and full-scale operation.

The conclusions of the study are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, as well as repeat sales and sales volume models. A hedonic model is a statistical analysis method used to estimate the impact of house characteristics on sales prices. None of the models uncovered conclusive statistical evidence of the existence of any widespread property value effects that might be present in communities surrounding wind energy facilities.

“It took three years to collect all of the data and analyze more than 50 different statistical model specifications,” says co-author and project manager Ryan Wiser of Berkeley Lab, “but without that amount of effort, we would not have been confident we were giving stakeholders the best information possible.”

“Though the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, their frequency is too small to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact,” he added.

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 energy facility did not demonstrably impact sales prices. The Berkeley Lab researchers also did not find statistically observable differences in prices for homes located closer to wind facilities than those located further away, or for homes that sold after the announcement or construction of a wind energy facility when compared to those selling prior to announcement. Even for those homes located within a one-mile distance of a wind project, the researchers found no persuasive evidence of a property value impact.

“Although studies that have investigated residential sales prices near conventional power plants, high voltage transmission lines, and roads have found some property value impacts,” says co-author and San Diego State University Economics Department Chair Mark Thayer, “the same cannot be said for wind energy facilities, at least given our sample of transactions.“

Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at www.lbl.gov/

Additional Information:

• http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/re-pubs.html">Download the report, “The Impact of Wind Power Projects on Residential Property Values in the United States: A Multi-Site Hedonic Analysis”
• View a PowerPoint presentation http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/emp-ppt.html">summarizing key findings from the study
• More information about DOE’s http://windandhydro.energy.gov/">Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program
• For more information on the report, contact Ben Hoen (benhoen2@earthlink.net, 845-758-1896) or Ryan Wiser (RHWiser@lbl.gov, 510-486-5474).

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Looking at these results as a whole, a somewhat monotonic order from low to high is found as homes are situated further away from wind facilities, but all of the coefficients are relatively small and none are statistically different from zero. This suggests that, for homes in the sample at least, there is a lack of statistical evidence that the distance from a home to the nearest wind turbine impacts sales prices, and this is true regardless of the distance band. ...

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In Vermont, home to many people with a back-to-the-land viewpoint, surveys show that people want to move away from fuels like coal and oil that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide. They also support renewable energy.

But the same surveys show less consensus on nuclear power. At energy workshops last year, nearly two-thirds of participants said Vermont utilities should cease buying power from the nuclear plant — unless fossil fuels and out-of-state nuclear power were the alternatives, in which case more than half would continue with Vermont Yankee.

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In general, for each study area, residential transaction data in as close proximity to the wind turbines as possible was sought, from both before and after wind facility construction. To balance the cost and quantity of data collection in each study area with the desire to cover as many study areas as possible, the research effort sought to collect data on 400 to 1,250 transactions in each study area.²⁴ In some instances, this meant including all residential transactions within ten miles of the wind turbines. In others, only transactions within five miles were included. In some extreme instances, when the number of transactions inside of five miles far exceeded the 1,250 limit, all transactions in close proximity to the wind turbines (e.g., inside three miles) were included in combination with a random sample of transactions outside of that distance band (e.g., between three and five miles).²⁵ The data selection processes for each Area are contained in Appendix A.

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²⁴ This range was chosen to ensure that a minimum of data were present in each study area to allow for a robust analysis, and yet not too much so as to make data collection (e.g., the visiting of each home) inordinately time and resource consuming in any individual study area.

²⁵ An alternative method would have been to collect data on every sale that occurred. Although in most cases this would be preferred, in ours it would not have added one additional transaction within close proximity or with dramatic views of wind turbine, the focus of the study. Rather, it would have added an overwhelming majority of transactions of homes without views and at distances outside of three miles from the turbines, all of which would have come at considerably cost and, more importantly, would not likely have influenced the results significantly while perhaps necessitating a reduction in the total number of study areas that could be included in the sample.

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Can I hear the turbines?

Noise issues were associated with some early wind projects, however, noise has been reduced through advances in system designs and the appropriate use of setbacks from residences. Typical noise levels from turbines, at the base of a tower, are 80-90 decibels (dB), or the same level of noise you would routinely hear inside a home or office. Noise levels drop to about 35 dB at one-quarter of a mile (1,300 feet) from the turbine. At this distance, the turbines are barely discernible above normal conversation and their noise is typically muted by the naturally occurring noises at a site. If turbines are sited 1,000 feet or more from residences, noise concerns are usually mitigated.

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