BERKELEY, CALIF.— Wind energy projects don’t adversely affect values of nearby residential property, according to a study released Wednesday by the U. S. Department of Energy‘s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

The 164-page report, which was funded by the DOE, is based on site visits, data collection and analysis of nearly 7,500 single-family home sales where wind farms are located in New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Oregon and Washington.

“Neither the view of wind energy facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes,” Ben Hoen, report author and a Berkeley Lab consultant said Wednesday.

“No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back: No evidence of widespread impacts,” he said.

The analysis revealed that home sales prices are very sensitive to the overall quality of scenic views from a property, but that a view of a wind energy facility did not demonstrably impact sales prices, the report states.

During the three-year study, a team of researchers for the project collected data on homes located within 10 miles of 24 existing wind energy facilities in the nine states. The closest home was 800 feet from a wind farm.

Each home in the sample was visited to collect important on-site information, such as whether wind turbines were visible from a home.

Home sales used in the study happened between 1996 and 2007, spanning the period prior to the announcement of each wind energy facility to well after its construction and full-scale operation, the report stated.

The study conclusions are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, and repeat sales and sales volume models.

A hedonic model is a statistical analysis method used to estimate the impact of house characteristics on sales prices.

None of the models uncovered conclusive statistical evidence of the existence of any widespread property value effects that might be present in communities surrounding wind energy facilities.

Ryan Wiser, co-author and project manager of Berkeley Lab, said it took three years to collect all of the data and analyze more than 50 different statistical model specifications.

“Though the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, their frequency is too small to result in any widespread, statistically observable impact,” Wiser said.

More than 30,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity is currently installed across the nation, and an increasing number of communities are considering new wind power facilities.

Given these developments, lab researchers decided an urgent need existed to investigate typical community concerns about wind energy and to provide stakeholders involved in the wind project siting process a common base of knowledge.

“Although studies that have investigated residential sales prices near conventional power plants, high voltage transmission lines, and roads have found some property value impacts, the same cannot be said for wind energy facilities, at least given our sample of transactions,” Mark Thayer, co-author and chairman of the San Diego State University Economics Department said.

The lab, which is located in Berkeley, Calif., conducts unclassified scientific research for the DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California.

To view or download the report, visit http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/wind_power_projects_residential_property_values.pdf.

To view a PowerPoint presentation summarizing key findings from the study, visit http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-2829e-ppt.pdf.

For more information on the report, contact Hoen at 845-758-1896 or benhoen2@earthlink.net or Wiser at 510-486-5474 or RHWiser@lbl.gov.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com