Wind Farms have no negative impact on property prices - US study concludes

If you're worried about the effect a nearby wind farm may have on your properties value when you come to sell it, or even if there are plans afoot to develop and site a wind farm or single wind turbine near your property, in the US, a study has concluded there should be no negative impact on the selling price.

The Department of Energy carried out a comprehensive 3 year analysis comparing house prices before and after wind farm installations, taking into account house characteristics and repeat sales and sale volumes across nine states.

The report, published on Renewable Energy Focus goes on: "None of the 8 models uncovered any conclusive evidence of the existence of any widespread property value effects that might be present in communities surrounding wind farms. Specifically, neither the view of wind turbines nor the distance of homes to turbines was found to have any consistent, measurable or significant effect on the selling prices of the homes.

“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, they are either too small and/or too infrequent to result in any widespread, statistically observable effect,” the report notes.

“No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back - no evidence of widespread impacts,” says report co-author Ben Hoen. It took three years to collect the data and analyse 50 different statistical model specifications."

This line particularly interested me... “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,” adds co-author Mark Thayer."

So wind farms - good for the environment and if the UK follows suit on the data revealed in this american study, not bad for your property value either.

photo credit: I See Modern Britain