No. I live near a large onshore wind farm with 2.5MW wind turbines and go walking near them regularly. They are inaudible from more than 200m away.

Could that be related to other maritime noises, like waves or seagulls?

I walk through one of these eyesore fields regularly, and I can hear them easily from 200m away.

I like the wind farm views. It's very subjective of course. Though most people don't like change, and since old power generating stations were high density (eg. a coal plant, just a big building and a smokestack) the new low-density things are naturally running into this change resistance.

India’s demographic distribution is very different from America’s.

May as well tell them to avoid tundras.

Also the land distribution is vastly different. 60% is agriculture, 24% is forest cover. Compare that to US where most of the land is cow pastures.

You people talk about changing where you live as if replacing your house was cheap and easy.

I don't know who "you people" are but I wasn't talking about anyone moving. People don't live in the middle of grain fields, so nobody needs to move.

The average size of an agricultural holding was 1.08 hectares (2.67 acres) in 2015-16 and declining over time [1]. A lot of Indian land is small farms with houses clustered among them.

That’s not to say that India doesn’t produce a lot of wind energy, though - it’s the second largest source of renewable energy after solar according to the most recent source I could get (Feb 2020) [2].

[1] https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=199780

[2] https://cea.nic.in/dashboard/?lang=en check “Renewable Energy” under “Generation”

Is 1.08 hectares enough for a sustainable grain farm? I would imagine those smaller ones are for vegetables but I could be wrong...

Noise doesn't only affect humans.

Funny how people are suddenly concerned with other species when a wind turbine is placed near their home. But when an out-of-sight coal plant belches out tons of pollutants which affect thousands of species, that concern seems to vanish. Quaint.

The discussion is comparing solar to wind, nobody is suggesting coal as an alternative, so this complaint seems out of place.

Not really. It's an observation on human nature. It's about how certain problems are only problems when they fit a narrative, and can be conveniently ignored otherwise. It seems like the toxicity of solar panel production is also conveniently being ignored, or how much water it requires. Certainly less than coal, but more than wind turbines.

It’s less water over the life of the product though.

Well, let me know when you have a study showing how the mice and vipers in those fields are affected.

Well, there is a DLR (essentially Germany's NASA) study about the effect of wind turbines on insects [1]. It's not pretty. Neither is the study on the effect on birds [2] by NABU, one of our "Sierra Club"-style organisations.

[1] https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/01/20190326... links to an English-language interview.

[2] https://bergenhusen.nabu.de/imperia/md/nabu/images/nabu/einr...

It's not pretty is not what the research concluded.

"From the currently available figures and the DLR model calculation, we cannot conclude either that wind energy plays a significant role in the reduction of insect numbers, or that it has no impact. "

Needs more research.

There's no mention of sound or noise in either one of those.

The insect study focusses on getting hit by the turbine wing, that's right. The bird study only talks about effects, without specifying effects, and takes note about bird-specific things like "avoidance distance", which is linked to - among other factors - noise.

Tbh: it does feel like you are moving goalposts because the studies do not show what you'd like them to show, that wind energy is green and ecologically friendly. We see that a lot.

>>> Wind produces noise

>> Noise doesn't only affect humans.

> Well, let me know when you have a study showing how the mice and vipers in those fields are affected.

This part of the thread is about noise. I'm not moving the goalpost, you're just off topic.

This is anecdata, but I was hiking through an eolic field and saw a group of semi-wild horses directly below a turbine. Some of them were grazing, others were resting/sleeping. None of them could care less about the noise.

Some people seem to develop an allergy to the frequency, the way some people are sensitive to MSG or Gluten while others are unharmed. There haven't been many studies that I'm aware of but I've met enough people who reported these symptoms that I don't think they're making things up.

Is there evidence that that is a real thing opposed to completely made up nonsense like many other "sensitivities" [1] that are popular right now? Real question; I'm not qualified to know the difference.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...

It's a bit of a hot take, but I think there's insufficient understanding of just how much of our everyday health complaints are psychosomatic, and just how much of our mental activity doesn't take place in the brain. An allergy to subsonics is certainly a made-up complaint, the only question being whether it's made up by the brain or the immune system. And the only practical difference between those two is that the brain is more plastic.

If the subject doesn't practise deliberate reprogramming of their mental architecture, it doesn't matter much whether the illness is in the more or less pliable medium, because they don't have the tools to reshape it either way. I guess one could run an experiment by seeing whether it's amenable to talk therapy and categorise the issue that way, but it would still depend a lot on the therapist in question and the subject's willingness to participate.

No, it's a classic nocebo.

There recently was a bit of a scandal in Germany because for years a major government authority has reported levels of "infrasound" from wind turbines far above what was physically plausible. A lot of the fearmongering relied on those numbers - yet it turned out they were due to a calculation error.