Wind farms do not reduce house prices, study finds
The presence of nearby wind farms has no negative effect on house prices, a new study has shown.
The peer-reviewed paper, from US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, looked at sales of 7,500 houses at a variety of distances from wind farms, running from a few hundred metres to 15 km.
"No evidence is found that home prices surrounding wind facilities are consistently, measurably and significantly affected either by the view of wind facilities or the distance of the home to those facilities," the paper found.
"Homes located near the wind facilities that transacted more than once were found to have appreciated between those sales by an amount that was no different from that experienced by homes located in an area many miles away from the wind facilities.
"Although the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been or could be negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, they are either too small and/or too infrequent to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact."
The paper is just the second academic study on the subject, due to the difficulties researchers found in trying to isolate variables.
Many houses close to wind farms were also in areas of greater natural beauty, for instance.
The Berkeley study, which comes ahead of a UK government investigation into the same issue, actually saw the authors visit each of the houses in their data set.
Researchers found that even where the wind farm could be seen from the home, it had no measurable effect on house prices, with the study finding counter-intuitively that those where the turbine was visible actually had higher than expected prices.
The authors did accept, however, that there could be a temporary dip in house prices when the idea of a wind farm is proposed, although the drop in value was negated once construction was complete.
The study comes amid continued heated debate over wind farms, which often splits people down the middle according to whether they are from the countryside or the city.
Ukip has made considerable political capital out of its wind farm policy, which would cancel all future constructions.
The Tories have promised to give local communities greater power to stop the construction of wind farms in their area.
