501
People Are Okay With Wind & Solar Installations In Their Neighborhoods, Studies Say
(cleantechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
501 points (98.3% liked)
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Interesting. In my country nobody wants to live next to windmills (I'm from the Netherlands). The sound and even the constant shadows falling over your house is said to be causing mental health issues.
Mind you, The Netherlands is a very densly populated country.
I'd say about 30% has solar on their roof though.
E: here's a research that had been done by our government: It seems mostly in English, for those that want to read it.
https://www.rivm.nl/bibliotheek/rapporten/2020-0150.pdf
Conclusion seems to be that it cannot be said for certain that the sound of windmills are the sole reason for sleeplessness and mental health problems.
There's been a German study and please don't ask me to find the pdf but the basic comparison was between comparable installations in the north and in the east, major difference between those categories being whether they were owned by a local citizen coop or a big company from whoknowswhere.
Long story short: If the blade swooshing sounds like "cha-ching" it actually lulls people to sleep, while easterners have rather negative experience with companies from whoknowswhere coming in and suddenly owning stuff. The average is propbably somewhere in the middle, "eh not as nice like a river but way better than a highway in the distance", focussing only on the sound, not associations with it.
As to shadowing though yes that can definitely be nasty. Luckily we have the science necessary to predict where the sun will be and can build the windmills such that moving shadow don't hit homes at all, or only for a minute a couple of days a year or such.
Totally unrelated, but which theoretical field would the science of knowing where the shadow falls be? As in, if you can only hire one scholar to do the plans?
I would say astronomy or geography, but I guess a scholar of photon physics might work?
The sun's position is astronomy the rest is engineering. I guess if you want to go really fancy you could involve horology.