MORE ON NOISE

What is this strange recording that VVASP tried to broadcast from the back of a truck before the police told them to turn it off?

According to VVASP, it's the sound of a windfarm.

Well, now. The Wind of Change team has quite a file of statements, growing all the time, from regular contributors and local residents who have visited or even holidayed by windfarms in the UK and in Europe. All of them report on how quiet the windfarms are, even downwind on a windy day. Two statements have recently come in regarding visits to the delightfully-named Bicker Fen, a windfarm of 13 new turbines. The noise - if that's what you want to call it - is negligible, whether directly under the blades or at varying distance from the turbines.

So what are we to make of the VVASP noise machine?

It would be unreasonable to expect VVASP to come clean about the recording. While the nimbies are busily accusing ScottishPower Renewables of telling lies (if anyone has come across a blatant untruth or misleading statement made by SPR in the Lenchwick Windfarm saga so far, please email it in and the Wind of Change team will research it), their own track record in this respect is pretty shabby.

In fact, expert opinion is now determining that VVASP's literature would incur an adverse ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority.

There are indications, however, that the recording VVASP is so proud of concerned a windfarm at Ireleth in Cumbria.

The seven-turbine windfarm at Ireleth starting operating in July 1999. There was some discrepancy between the original proposal for the windfarm and the eventual layout. While this does raise a few questions, it should be remembered that the late '90s was still back in the Dark Ages, where wind energy was concerned. Things have moved on a long way since then.

Three and a half years after the Ireleth windfarm began generating energy, Barrow Borough Council dropped a planning enforcement order against the windfarm developer. Six local residents then took out a private prosecution against the owners and operators of the windfarm on the grounds of 'noise nuisance'. Early in January 2004, a district judge ruled that the companies were not guilty of creating a 'noise nuisance'. Judge Peter Wallace had simply not been convinced by the six local residents that there was a case to answer.

Naturally, the nimbies cried foul, pretending that the judge was in the pocket of the windfarm owners and operators.

As far as the nimbies are concerned, ANYONE who disagrees with them is working for a windfarm company. But that is the point at which conspiracy theory slips into paranoia and clinical insanity. If you imagine that anyone who doesn't agree with your rather alarmist notions is in hock to the wind lobby, then you need professional help.

The Ireleth experience can be put into perspective. A study published in 2007 by Salford University concluded that complaints about noise from windfarms were remarkably rare. Over the course of a fifteen-year period, just 239 formal complaints had been made about windfarm noise. That's less than sixteen a year. There are over 300,000 complaints made every year about other forms of noise.

So - if it is a recording of Ireleth that is being played by VVASP, then it is a matter of legal record that the windfarm in question does not create a 'noise nuisance'. And it is a matter of statistical record that complaints about such noise are astonishingly few and far between.

Now, let's face it. The nimby movement is desperate to find the smoking gun, that one conclusive piece of evidence that windfarms are noisy. It would be like gold dust to them.

And supporters of the Lenchwick Windfarm would want to know what measures could be taken to protect residents from such a problem.

But the very obscurity of the VVASP recording is effectively proof that it isn't the 'smoking gun' the protesters have been looking for. If it did what it claimed to do, then anyone with half an eye on the windfarm issue, locally and nationally, would have heard about it. The supporters would be demanding answers to such questions as, 'Why is this windfarm noisy when others aren't? What's being done to overcome that problem?'

It may, or may not, be a realistic recording of a rather old and relatively primitive windfarm. By playing it at top volume, the nimbies are distorting whatever value the recording might have to them. And given VVASP's endless capacity for diseminating false or misleading information, it must be assumed that the recording isn't quite as straightforward as they want you to think it is.

Those who are interested may care to check back through this blog for an analysis of a video screened on the VVASP website. That video claimed to prove that a Cumbrian windfarm was noisy. In fact, it managed to prove nothing of the sort. If anything, a sober and serious study of the video concluded, yet again, that the 'noise nuisance' of windfarms is grossly exaggerated by nimby groups.

Out of the two - windfarms and anti-windfarm groups - there can be little doubt as to which is the noisiest.