My experience disagrees with that claim. But I suggest an easier way to verify this, which is to just go to YouTube and look at videos of the sound produced by wind turbines on land. You will hear the distinct loud woosh sound of the actual blades and not the gearbox. Personally, I feel a lot of the academic denial around this noise issue is from people with an activist goal.

YouTube videos are not very difficult to edit. If you search YouTube for “noisy windmills,” I’m sure you’ll get… something.

Anyway windmills are all over the place, lots of people have had the experience of being near them. If they make too much noise, that’s a problem of course, but I think lots of people can verify the existence of non-noisy ones by virtue of having seen them in person. So, sure, loud designs should be avoided since there are perfectly good alternatives.

> YouTube videos are not very difficult to edit.

And academic papers are not difficult to fudge up with edited fraudulent data [1].

Even Ivy League colleges are committing rampant fraud sometimes for activism sometimes just to get attention and get more papers published.

It’s sad that we’re at a time where academia is as untrustworthy as random videos on YouTube.

But i agree with noiseless windmills part, they should be promoted more instead of noisy ones that will discourage more clean energy initiatives.

[1](https://retractionwatch.com/)

I mean, nobody would say the academic publishing ecosystem is super healthy (every academic hates it, for one). But the existence of something like “retraction watch” points to the fact that these aren’t really comparable ecosystems. Nobody need bothers to catalogue the lies on YouTube because that’s an impossible and pointless task.

The academic process has always been messy and political, and yet universities do keep churning out research and students.

> The academic process has always been messy and political, and yet universities do keep churning out research and students.

The youtube process has always been messy and political, and yet new creators do keep churning out great content that people love watching and spreading awareness about various issues.

:)

The youtube show : “Undecided by Matt Ferrell” is my favourite

Lotta clickbait, too. They need it to keep earning, even if they don't like it.

I recall Tom Scott saying there was one video he basically couldn't make, because the climax was switching on a big light, which was actually silent, but it felt wrong unless he dubbed a sound over that and such dubbing was against his editorial standard.

That’s interesting. Without knowing what the switch was, I guess it is hard to say, but a switch that kicked off some big process silently seems like it could be really dramatic and cool.

You seem to have missed the point of the research, which is all about underwater sound propagation.

Wind turbines are moving a lot faster than they appear. E.g. Vestas v164 [1] rotates only at max 12 times per minute so looks slow. But because it has 80m blades, the tip speed is up to 100 meters per second (230mph). That's 1/3rd the speed of sound! That can generate a lot of noise.

[1] https://en.wind-turbine-models.com/turbines/1419-mhi-vestas-...

That explains why they would make broadband noises but not peaky high-q noises like the ones in the paper.