WIND TURBINE SHADOW FLICKER – Flicked into Touch?

Last week, a court ruled that “wind turbine shadow flicker”  from a wind turbine would be of such a nuisance that, along with the degradation of the scenery,  it would constitute grounds to support an injunction to have the wind turbine installation stopped for good. Nevada Supreme Court so ruled in respect of a 75-foot wind turbine just outside Carson City.  Justice Jim Hardesty said the turbine would also cause “shadow flicker,” an alternating pattern of light and dark shadows occurring when the blades rotate in the sun. This wasn’t some conglomerate trying to get a foot in the door, but a homeowner Rick Sowers wanting the wind turbine to supply energy to his home in the Washoe Valley. It could have also supplied nearby residents and reduced their utility bills.

But instead, they chose to object under the “nuisance” law which describes a nuisance as “anything which is injurious to health, or indecent and offensive to the senses, or an obstruction to the free use of property, so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property.”This is a microcosm of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality that pervades attempts to use renewable energy to reduce pollution across the globe. It is not known whether the Justice has investments in fossil fuels, but he sure as heck doesn’t have any in wind power.

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And just how many people have died from shadow flicker as compared to asthmatics having a bad time because of carbon air pollution? But let’s not antagonize.  We want to win over the skeptics, not flicker them to death. “Shadow flicker drives people mad, even if they keep their curtains shut or their blinds down,” said Angela Kelly, head of a British anti-wind-turbine pressure group called Country Guardian. Of course, this only occurs when the sun is visible and low in the sky and the house is in the direct path of the sun and the turbine.  It’s no matter that the sun rarely shines more than 20% of days in the UK and that the amount of time before the sun moves to a different position is ten minutes maximum and the number of houses affected is less than 1% of all housing stock.

However, in order to appease the wind grumble lobby, a  possible solution is available. Vestas Wind Systems has developed a predictive system that works out when shadow flicker is about to happen and stops the turbine from rotating until the sun moves the shadows onto uninhabited land. It’s called the Vestas Shadow Detection System. The technology is based on software that computes four risk factors: the angle and position of the sun, the distance of the wind turbine to any potentially affected properties, the radius of the rotor blades and the height of the turbine hub from the ground. Once the risk of shadow flicker has been calculated, the software decides whether the turbine should be temporarily shut down until the sun passes and the shadow flicker moves on from homes.