While the mainstream media will insist that the public are broadly against wind power developments, the reality – according to a recent Canadian study – points to a growing acceptance. And fewer complaints than you might expect.
A spokesman for the Pembina Institute explains all…
No other province in Canada has a longer history with wind energy than Alberta, which has 20 years of experience with utility-scale wind farms. Yet, unlike some parts of the country, we don’t tend to hear much about it. There hasn’t been much research into this issue to date, so we set out to discover what sorts of complaints officials in Alberta have received about wind energy projects from nearby residents.
At the Pembina Institute, we’ve done the math, and to get to a low-carbon future, wind energy is one technology that we are going to need more of. While it isn’t a silver bullet, wind energy is a cost-effective way of displacing highly polluting sources of electricity, which are particularly common and damaging in Alberta.
But we also know that wind energy development needs to be done properly, taking into account local impacts and residents’ concerns (and revenue opportunities), a balance we’ve explored in our past work on the topic. By examining the nature of complaints about wind power in the province, we hoped to determine what improvements might be made.
Few complaints reported
We’ve just released a summary of our research (outlined below). As it turns out, there isn’t much to report – at least with respect to operating wind farms. We heard that wind projects attract notable concern when they’re undergoing permitting; and some have also drawn complaints during construction (including mostly road impacts and congestion, as well as dust problems). But very few complaints have come in about operating turbines.
To be clear: this research was not a comprehensive effort to take the pulse of rural attitudes toward wind energy. It provides an objective indicator of whether or not Albertans register many complaints with officials about operating wind turbines. And they do not. But this cannot prove whether Albertans support or oppose wind energy.
It does, however, align with a recent study published by researchers at the University of Western Ontario, which found that residents in a community without wind turbines but with a proposed wind energy project were less supportive of wind energy development and more concerned about negative impacts than a community with turbines nearby. Those findings might help to explain why so many more concerns are reported prior to a project’s operation, compared to once projects are up and running, as our research found.
