Berkeley, California: Having a wind farm locate near your home is not likely to harm the value of your house, new research seems to indicate. A December 2 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories finds that proximity to wind energy facilities does not have a pervasive or widespread adverse effect on the property values of nearby homes. The same study, which may also bear upon wind power development in Canada, found that an increasing number of communities are considering new wind power facilities in the United States.
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 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.
Over 30,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity are already installed across the United States, the report adds. Given these developments, it says, 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 copy of the report “The Impact of Wind Power Projects on Residential Property Values in the United States” can be downloaded directly from the Laboratory’s website at: http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/re-pubs.html