As wind energy expands in the United States, concerns have grown about the potential for tall turbines to be a drag on property values.
But a new nationwide study that analyzed data from 300 million home sales and 60,000 wind turbines finds turbines' impact on home values is much lower than previously thought – about a 1% drop on average for a home with at least one wind turbine within six miles.
The study's authors find the most impact on home prices happens if a home is less than five miles from a turbine; the further a home is from a turbine, the less of a value hit it takes.
Even for homes close to a turbine, the study finds the negative impact to property value "diminishes and eventually disappears" within a decade.
To measure the impact,
scientists set out with a very simple question, said Max Auffhammer, a study co-author and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
"We really wanted to get at, can you see that thing from where your house is?" Auffhammer told CNN.
Getting the answer required building a massive mapping database of the distance between US homes and wind turbines, accounting for changes in topography and other factors.
"We calculated whether you can see the turbine – or whether there is a mountain in the way, for example – and if so, how the house value changes compared to other houses in the same area where residents cannot see the wind turbine," Wei Guo, the study's lead author and a researcher at the Italian Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, said in a statement.
The study also explored just how big wind turbines appear to the human eye. They found that, on average, a wind turbine five miles away appeared roughly the same size as an aspirin tablet held with an outstretched arm. If the same turbine were one mile away, it would appear the size of a golf ball.
Auffhammer said one of the study's most interesting findings was most of the dips in housing value were driven by early wind turbine installations in the US at the end of the 1990s. Closer to 2020, "we don't really find an effect," Auffhammer added.
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