Those who claim that wind turbines are harmful to human and animal health argue that the infrasound and low-frequency noise generated by the turbines turning are direct causes of the symptoms experienced by those who report problems. They passionately reject the suggestion that their negative experiences are in any way mediated by personal or social factors like antipathy toward windfarms, anxiety about the possible effects of exposure, a general disposition toward complaining, noise ‘sensitivity’, or any wider motivation to discredit windfarms.

As we saw in Chapter 2, windfarms existed in Australia long before these health complaints began to surface. The elephant in the room is this: if wind turbines did cause immediate effects in a proportion of people as claimed, why were there no clinical or even media reports of these problems between 1993 and 2004, when David Iser’s unpublished study about Toora emerged?1 If the claims are to be believed, why are there no records of the alleged problems in news media, wind-company records, or case reports published in medical journals? In this chapter and the next, we will consider some of the immediately obvious problems that arise for arguments that wind turbines are the direct cause of health problems in those exposed to them. We consider problems arising from claims that turbines cause rapid, acute effects; the idea that only those who are ‘susceptible’ suffer; and the mystery of why there are no case reports published in the medical literature about people suffering from health problems caused by wind turbines. We will then examine the proposition that it is only large, new turbines that might cause problems; the peculiar phenomenon of wind turbine health complaints being a disease that seems to occur mainly in English-speaking nations; an interesting antidote for health problems caused by wind turbines (the drug ‘money’); and finally the frequently made claims about windfarms causing people to ‘abandon’ their homes. We conclude the chapter by looking at the proposition that wind turbines are ‘the new tobacco’.

In the chapter following, we will then give a critical account of several of the windfarm opponents’ most often cited studies, which they seem to believe make a strong case for direct adverse effects of wind turbines on health.

Acute effects from wind turbine exposure

Windfarm opponents repeatedly argue that turbines cause both acute, rapid-onset effects and chronic, long-gestation health problems. The claim about acute effects in particular creates major problems for their argument.

It is common to read accounts like that above of people having been adversely affected within hours or even minutes of being exposed to turbines. The anti-windfarm film Pandora’s pinwheels provides many examples of opponents talking about such acute, immediate effects experienced when wind turbines are turning.3 They claim that when the turbines start up when the wind blows, the problems commence, but when the turbines stop turning or the sufferer spends time away from home, all is well and their symptoms reduce or stop. A seven-minute video promoted by the Waubra Foundation also shows several victims making these points.4

An unpublished Canadian report described a visit to turbine-exposed houses where the researchers involved in the study claim to have become affected almost immediately: ‘The onset of adverse health effects was swift, within twenty minutes, and persisted for some time after leaving the study area’.5 Apparently in all seriousness, Sarah Laurie from the Waubra Foundation told an April 2012 meeting of anti-turbine protestors in the Victorian town of Mortlake that one night in a house in proximity to a wind turbine saw ‘just about everybody … every five or ten minutes needing to go to the toilet’.6 So, let’s assume the residents went to bed at 11 pm and got up at 7 am. If we take Laurie at her word, that would mean over 60 visits to the toilet for each person during the night. Perhaps her claim was nothing more than rhetorical hyperbole for her supporters, common in motivational talks. Perhaps all she intended to say was that the people in the house went to the toilet more than usual that night. Perhaps her audience wondered whether those in the house had been drinking a lot. Did many among them have prostate problems that might have added to their need to urinate so often? And perhaps they might have wondered why, if it were true that those present had collectively experienced a sudden Niagara of urination, did this bizarre phenomenon apparently go unreported to medical authorities?

If I were in a house with multiple occupants and ‘just about everybody’ came down with repeated bouts of the same symptoms throughout the night, I would expect that those present might find the experience disturbing and formally report it. This would almost certainly occur with food poisoning or exposure to some unidentified environmental pathogen. But as we will see, a mysteriously large number of hand-on-heart claims about the serious health problems caused by windfarms never come to the attention of the doctors of those who make them.

If it was the case that wind turbines caused rapid-onset, acute health effects, a big problem immediately arises for those making this claim. Windfarms existed in Australia long before the first claims about health ever surfaced. Australia’s first, the Ten Mile Lagoon windfarm near Esperance, Western Australia, started generating power in 1993 so has been operational for 24 years. There have been no recorded health or noise complaints from any of the residents living within ten kilometres of the windfarm (ten kilometres is a distance commonly argued by opponents as the distance within which people are affected). Victoria’s first windfarm, Codrington, has been operating since June 2001, and has 14 turbines, each capable of producing 1.3 MW. There’s nothing new about large wind turbines in Australia. And yet health complaints are relatively recent, with the few in Codrington occuring after a visit to the area by a vocal opponent with an interest in spreading anxiety.

Only the ‘susceptible’ suffer

Windfarm opponents are well aware that a very small minority of people in any given community will report symptoms that they attribute to windfarms. Nor do they argue that the many health problems listed in Appendix 1 are unique to those exposed to turbines, but only that turbines can cause or aggravate these problems in ‘susceptible’ people. This is like saying that the only people affected are those who are affected.

They nonetheless need to advance some explanation of why most people are unaffected. Here, they point to other exposures that affect people differently. Most people can eat particular foods (e.g. those containing gluten or peanut) and experience no ill-effects whatsoever. Others have adverse reactions which can be swift and sometimes very serious, even life-threatening. Some suffer motion sickness in cars, boats or aircraft while others do not. And some, they argue, react badly to noise, including the sound emitted from wind turbines.

We all understand that infectious pathogens like viruses and bacteria can have a wide range of infectivity: only a proportion of people exposed to these agents acquire those diseases. But there is a thundering great rhino in the room that rather wrecks this quaint analogy when it is applied to windfarms.

Every community exposed to infectious or toxic agents like influenza, Legionella, Ebola, very high air pollution particle counts, salmonella in food, and so on will report ‘incident’ (i.e. new) cases following those exposures. Every community will have members who are susceptible to motion sickness. But there are no recorded instances of cholera being found in a local water supply where no one was stricken with cholera.

With windfarms, a very large number have never attracted any health or noise complaints from nearby residents. For example, when we searched for evidence of health or noise complaints in all of Australia in 2012, we found that 33 out of 51 (64.7 percent) of Australian windfarms, including 18 of 33 (54.5 percent) with turbine sizes larger than 1 MW, had never been subject to noise or health complaints.7 These 33 farms had an estimated 21,633 residents living within a five-kilometre radius and had operated complaint-free for a cumulative 267 years. Western Australia and Tasmania had seen no complaints. There is no remotely plausible explanation why, in these 33 areas, there was no one apparently ‘susceptible’ to the alleged ill effects of windfarms. Why were there no susceptible people in two whole states? Are Western Australians and Tasmanians made of sterner stuff than their eastern counterparts? There is also a problem of inconsistency with the motion sickness analogy. In a video posted by Stop These Things, several members of a family describe being badly affected by wind turbines.8 The argument appears to be that the alleged effects of turbine noise affect all or most of those in a house. But motion sickness typically does not ‘run in families’: we generally see situations where perhaps only one person in a family gets car or sea sick, rather than most or all. If turbine noise is affecting most occupants in a small proportion of houses near turbines, problems immediately arise for the ‘individual susceptibility’ hypothesis. An alternative explanation, that the adverse reaction is socially ‘contagious’ within communicative environments where the turbines are disliked and provoke anxiety, is very plausible. We discuss this in Chapter 5.

Opponents also repeatedly say that animals such as sheep, cattle, dogs and poultry are badly affected, with problems like malformations, sudden death, sterility and yolkless eggs being common (see Appendix 1). Against this, on any trip to a windfarm region, one can find hundreds of livestock grazing contentedly around the turbines. In Tasmania there is a poultry farm at Sassafras with a wind turbine at the front gate, very near the poultry barns, that helps power the farm.9 Is the argument here that only some animals are ‘susceptible’ too? 

A disease that only speaks English?

The ‘individual susceptibility’ argument faces its biggest test when we look at the international pattern of complaints. It has been frequently noted that complaining about wind turbines is very obviously an Anglophone phenomenon. Modern multi-megawatt wind turbines have operated since 1978 in the USA and Europe. Today, there are an estimated 314,000 turbines in operation globally.10 European nations with windfarms include Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Spain, and Sweden. The turbines are often located very near cities, towns and villages (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2), thus exposing a huge number of people across Europe to their putative sickening sound emissions on a daily basis. Anyone who has spent time in these nations will have seen many of them.11

Yet windfarm health complaints have nearly all occurred in English-speaking nations. In Canada, parts of English-speaking Ontario have experienced many complaints while neighbouring Francophone Quebec sees little opposition. In Australia, complaints have been concentrated around farms targeted by anti-windfarm groups, suggesting the phenomenon is a ‘communicated disease’.12

Since I became interested in windfarms and the problems they allegedly cause, I’ve gone out of my way to ask my international colleagues when I see them whether this is a ‘problem’ in their countries. European and Asian public health colleagues tend to ask me to repeat the question, as if they were confused about what I was asking. They then nearly always say that they have never even heard of the issue.

I once asked two friends, one of whom was a former health and medical reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, if they would ask local residents about the issue as they undertook a six-week walk in northern Spain, where there are many windfarms. When they returned home they said, ‘Look, we asked quite a few people about it in the first few days when we were walking near windfarms. But people always looked at us as if we were some sort of weirdos, asking about that. No one we spoke with had ever heard of it. So we just stopped asking after a while.’

I stressed this point in my submission to the 2015 Australian Senate inquiry into windfarms.13 In their final report, the committee stated:

Unlike Rapley, with his excited and vacuous talk of being ‘bombarded’ by ‘thousands’ and ‘tonnes’ of complainants but no record of having made these publicly available, I took the trouble to transparently attempt to quantify estimates of complainants in Australia and submit these to a peer-reviewed journal, where they were published.15 As to the claim that the German Medical Association was representing ‘community concern’, enquiries revealed that it was simply passing on the concerns of just one of its thousands of members.

The Senate committee declared that it had received submissions that ‘contradicted’ my point about Anglophone nations dominating complaints. These included one from Lilli-Anne Green, whom they described as ‘the Chief Executive Officer of a healthcare consulting firm in the United States’. When questioned about the name of her company by Senator Urquhart, Green replied, ‘I do not want that on the record … I am speaking as a private citizen.’16 She later stated, ‘I am the only employee at this point in time.’ She affirmed that ‘300,000 physicians have undertaken training’ through her company. Green is also an active member of Wind Wise Massachusetts, an anti-windfarm group. Green stated in evidence that in 2012 she and her husband had interviewed people complaining about windfarms in ‘France, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden – who either needed an interpreter to speak with us or who spoke broken English.’ Her submitted evidence also stated that she had interviewed people in China and Portugal. When Senator Urquhart said to her, ‘I could not find any of the transcripts, either in your submission or online. I am sorry if I have missed them,’ Ms Green replied: ‘You have not missed them. In the company we are still in the process of editing the films. It is a huge undertaking of many months, at huge expense. There is a lot of information that is still being edited.’

Even David Leyonhjelm noted, with great understatement, ‘I appreciate we are not pretending this is a gold-plated, statistical survey.’

Green’s submission to the committee consisted of a set of slides about her interviews with windfarm opponents.17 They contain no data at all. It was beyond belief that the committee could cite this amateur ‘study’ as evidence of anything other than Green being someone totally immersed in the global anti-windfarm network and committed to its objectives. There is not a single piece of data in the submission, despite it purporting to be the ‘findings’ of Green’s global investigations. This epitomised the scientific illiteracy of the committee’s majority report. The committee also cited three Danish submissions of a similarly woeful quality, containing bald data-free statements like ‘there are health problems at many places’.18 One was from a mink farmer who lived near turbines and claimed that in one year, ‘There were over 2000 dead mink whelps … And the third part of them was seriously deformed.’ He also claimed to have had heart pains, and that ‘The doctors told me after the examination that there was nothing wrong with my heart.’19 Another of the Danish submissions stated:

Presumably, this is all a national conspiracy to cover up case reports of victims.

It looks like whoever wrote the Senate report was told to ‘find some submissions from non-English-speaking countries that we can throw back at Chapman’ and never bothered to actually read them.

The European Platform Against Windfarms website, run by activist Mark Duchamp (see Chapter 2), today lists 1276 organisations in 31 European countries allegedly opposed to windfarms. This is an increase since 2012, when the site listed 554 from 24 nations. Ketan Joshi took the trouble to look at a lot of those listed. His hilarious blog on his findings is worth reading. For example:

One link to an Italian site (Comitato Monte dei Cucchi) took you to a Japanese site on the best ways to cook rice.

Case reports

Most claims about the alleged health impacts of wind turbines come either from those who say they are being harmed, or from a small, often internationally networked group of dedicated windfarm opponents whose personal identities are often strongly bound up in their mission to ‘defeat’ the scourge of ‘industrial windfarms’. We will profile some of the latter group’s most prominent Australian members in Chapter 6. Here, we consider the role of those who believe they are suffering wind turbine syndrome, and the importance of case reports in assessing their claims.

Victims of diseases and health problems have had a long and often vitally important role in the evolution of the identification, understanding, treatment and prevention of disease. Indeed, our understanding of disease always starts with people who are affected coming to the attention of those in the health professions for the first time. Case reports of newly identified health problems have always been published in medical journals and in the writings of the ancient precursors of today’s physicians and other medical specialists. Today, newly identified and new strains of infectious and vector-borne diseases continue to occur (HIV, Ebola and Zika are three well-known examples from recent decades), and likewise whole new areas of complex disease aetiology have also emerged. Metabolic syndrome,22 the exponential rise in type-2 diabetes,23 and rapidly emerging concerns about endocrine-disrupting chemicals24 are just three examples. As further case studies come to light and are either reported in clinical journals or brought to the attention of health authorities for formal investigation, principles of disease investigation are used to address basic questions that include the quality of evidence, whether a relationship between a putative cause and a disease outcome is a mere statistical association or whether and to what extent criteria for establishing causality (such as the Bradford-Hill criteria25) are satisfied by the evidence available. As studies accumulate, systematic review and meta-analytic protocols are applied to the body of evidence to try to determine what conclusions can be drawn. Case reports are always the start of any process that leads to health authorities declaring that an agent, environmental exposure or behaviour causes a health problem. However, such case reports are only the very first step in what needs to happen before such causal conclusions can be drawn.

We have looked in vain for any clinical reports published in non-junk, peer-reviewed journals about the health problems said to be caused by exposure to wind turbines. Such clinical reports are common when doctors encounter unusual health problems with hitherto unreported possible aetiology. The closest we found was a 2013 news report mentioning a Massachusetts vestibular specialist, Steven Rauch, who had a patient referred to him by Nina Pierpont (who coined the term ‘wind turbine syndrome’).26 Rauch said he was ‘unwilling’ to rule out wind turbine syndrome as a real medical condition, and that it was a ‘plausible’ explanation. No report of the case was found in any medical journal. If this was a phenomenon with any substance, we would by now surely have seen a long series of such reports published. Strangely, none of the three medical vanguards of windfarm-caused ‘disease’ whom we discussed in Chapter 2 – Amanda Harry, David Iser and Nina Pierpont – appears to have published any such case reports in the peer-reviewed literature, in spite of the obvious importance to their concerns of doing so.

As we saw earlier, the nearest we have to such a report is the case report of one individual publicised at a conference by a group promoting the unrecognised ‘vibro-acoustic disease’.27 This research has never been published in any indexed peer-reviewed journal. Indeed, it would be an interesting exercise to survey medical practitioners working in townships near windfarms in the attempt to find anyone who has ever formally diagnosed even a single case of ‘wind turbine syndrome’ in Australia or elsewhere. If any such cases emerged from such a study, all (de-identified) relevant case notes could be made available to a panel of specialised doctors appointed by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Consent would of course be needed from the patients concerned, but as they would be entirely confident that their diagnosis was real, they would surely leap at the opportunity to have this corroborated by an independent, expert assessment process.

Past medical records of complainants

Another way of considering the veracity of health claims about turbines would be for those making the complaints to consent to having their past medical records examined. Such records from both before and after the operation of the suspect windfarm could settle the question both of whether the complaints were sufficiently serious to have been given medical attention, and whether the complainants had these problems before the windfarm commenced operation. In Canada in 2012, the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal called for a group of ‘wind action’ plaintiffs to produce such records. Tellingly, they declined, and their case fell over.28 They then complained that these medical records would have been too onerous to obtain:

This is a questionable claim: my GP can produce my records instantly onscreen, going back nearly 20 years. Canada has an advanced health care system, and producing medical records is highly unlikely to have been problematic.

Small turbines not noxious?

When it is pointed out that wind turbines existed in Australia long before health concerns emerged, one stock response from opponents is that in the years before health complaints were reported, the turbines operating were much smaller than those that are standard today. The implication is that only the very large turbines cause health complaints.

There are two problems with this answer. First, as mentioned, there were large wind turbines operating in Australia well before complaints started. These included those in Albany, Western Australia from October 2001 (1.9 MW turbines); Codrington, Victoria from 2003 (1.3 MW); Callicum Hills, Victoria from 2003 (1.5 MW); and Starfish Hill, South Australia, from 2003 (1.5 MW).

Second, a research paper from England examining residents’ perception of the noise emanating from small or micro wind turbines ‘showed individuals with a more negative attitude to wind turbines perceive more noise from a turbine located close to their dwelling and those perceiving more noise report increased levels of general symptoms.’30 Even tiny micro turbines like the one in Jubilee Park in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe (see Figure 3.3) are likely to draw negative responses from local people who don’t like them. So where are all the complaints in Australia about the many small turbines that have been operating for years?

Is money an antidote to windfarm complaints?

Wind turbine hosts almost never complain about the turbines that directly benefit them financially. This has been noted in several studies. For example, in 2014, Health Canada published a summary of the results of a much-awaited $2.1 million investigation into the health effects of windfarms. The report noted: ‘Annoyance was significantly lower among the 110 participants who received personal benefit, which could include rent, payments or other indirect benefits of having wind turbines in the area.’32 Some have remarked that the ‘money drug’ must therefore be a very effective antidote to the onset of any health complaints. Below, we describe the only two known cases in Australia of complaints from people who were benefitting financially from wind turbines. There are no known complaints in Australia by current or past windfarm employees, who are daily exposed both point-blank and at larger distances to wind turbine sound emissions and vibrations.

A stock response to this observation from those opposing windfarms is to argue that there are many examples of landowners who agree to host wind turbines on their land and then suffer in silence without being able to speak out. The claim is made that they are ‘gagged’ by clauses in their contracts with wind companies forbidding them from complaining publicly about their experiences. They instead suffer silently, with all the subtexts of injustice and corporate bullying that go along with such a claim.

I raised this issue with the 2015 Madigan-chaired Senate committee, who fired back in their report that ‘there have been several Australian windfarm hosts who have made submissions to this inquiry complaining of adverse health effects.’ Several? A footnote in the report directs readers to four submissions where this is said to be documented.33

Submission 118, at page 3, refers only to a court case during which a wind energy company called two witnesses who hosted turbines on their properties and were ‘bound by contracts not to speak against turbines’.34 There is no evidence that these two people had complaints themselves and were suppressing them under duress. Submission 356, at page 2, states:

This unsubstantiated statement clearly provides no evidence of any host complaining. Submission 165 was authored by a person who initially signed a contract to host turbines at the planned Robertstown windfarm, which was never built. So it too is not an example of a host who has complained about operating turbines.36

This leaves two known turbine hosts throughout Australia who have complained about the turbines on their property. We consider these two cases below.

A tale of two turbine hosts

The first example is the Gares (Clive and Trina), who host 19 turbines on the AGL-owned North Brown Hill (Hallet 4) windfarm 17 kilometres from Jamestown in South Australia. The 2015 Senate report states that the Gares have earned $2 million over five years for hosting the 19 turbines: $400,000 per year, or an average of $21,053 per year per turbine. Their house has been soundproofed by the wind company.

Clive Gare told the Senate committee that he suffers ‘sleep interruption, mild headaches, agitation and a general feeling of unease … only when the towers are turning, depending on the wind direction and wind strength.’ His work requires him to work among the turbines so he suffers ‘the full impacts of noise for days at a time without relief.’ He said he would not buy a house within 20 kilometres of a windfarm, despite already living in such a house. I was intrigued about this and so asked around some contacts I had in the wind industry. This is what I was told.

When the windfarm was being planned, the Gares’ property was considered as a possible location for the farm’s electricity substation, which would have earned them considerable extra money if they had agreed to sell a parcel of land to the company. In the event, a decision was made to locate the substation on the property of a neighbour who was willing to sell a similar small parcel of land. Sources within AGL told me that this decision caused some tension between the Gares and the company. This context may be relevant to understanding why the Gares chose to raise their complaints to the Senate committee.

The second turbine host who has complained is David Mortimer. He lives near Millicent in South Australia, and is one of Australia’s highest-profile critics of windfarms. Mortimer derives rental income from two turbines, which are part of the Lake Bonney windfarm. Mortimer bought a property in 1987 and agreed to the turbines being erected from 2004. In the ten years to May 2013, the Wattle Range Shire council had never received a health complaint from any resident. In the same period, Mortimer did not make a complaint to the windfarm operator, Infigen. Mortimer, however, has been a long-standing and vocal critic, claiming that he and his wife have been made ill by their exposure to the two turbines from around 2006 (although he did not make his claims public until 2012).

In about 2006 the Mortimers moved into a newly built house in the area with an expansive view, vacating their house on their property with the two turbines. In 2010, at a public consultation about the Woakine windfarm proposal, he learned that he would be able to see the proposed turbines from his new house. In his written submission to the planning process, he complained about the impact of the proposed Woakine development on his view and property values but did not mention health concerns.

Mortimer attended an anti-windfarm meeting at Mount Gambier on 27 March 2012, at which Senators Madigan and Xenophon spoke. There he heard for the first time allegations that windfarms make people sick. He claims that he then realised that windfarms were making him and his wife sick.37 In his presentation to a community forum on King Island in Tasmania he noted that his doctor had not found a connection between the turbines and his maladies. Further, in submissions, Mortimer has reported that he has worked with fibreglass at home, a pastime that exposes him to toxic chemicals. He has also reported that he spent a significant portion of his naval career exposed to loud artillery noises. On 4 June 2012 he appeared on the television program Today Tonight describing his health problems.38 He has since been interviewed on Sydney Radio 2GB by Alan Jones (January 2015)39 and Steve Price (March 2013)40 and has been covered extensively by the anonymously authored Stop These Things website (see Chapter 6). At a Stop These Things rally on 18 June 2013 he told the small audience that ‘somewhere during the night it [turbine noise] is going to wake me up and I am going to find myself halfway down the passageway, trying to get away from scorpions and snakes and whatever the hell frightens the hell out of me.’41

On 18 June 2013 Mortimer spoke at a poorly attended anti-windfarm rally on the front lawn of Parliament House in Canberra, chaired by Alan Jones (see Chapter 6).42 Here is part of what he said, with my emphasis in italics:

So, David Mortimer drove with his wife some 475 kilometres from his house near Millicent to near the town of Waterloo, where he ‘happened to turn up’ at Mary Morris’ place. Mortimer and Mary Morris are known to each other as active opponents of the windfarms near where they live. By claiming to have asked Mary Morris the next morning, ‘Are there any turbines around?’ and writing that he ‘had no idea until next day that there were turbines in our vicinity’, Mortimer was suggesting that he was unaware that she lived near the Waterloo windfarm, when in fact she has often written and spoken about its effects on those living in the district. So is this ‘Well, I never!’ account one that a reasonable person should accept?

Earlier in the year, Mortimer and his wife had travelled to King Island in Tasmania, where Mortimer spoke to a meeting of residents about a proposed development. The King Island Courier ran an account of his speech, in which he described his neighbours as ‘all being alcoholics’, charmingly adding that ‘if my house was on fire and I wasn’t threatened, I’d let them burn’. In his speech to the Parliament House rally Mortimer referred to this visit (emphasis added):

Mortimer had been invited to King Island to address a meeting of residents about the proposed new windfarm on the island. In his words above he suggests that through all his preparations for the visit, and during his conversations with those who had brought him there, he remained completely unaware that the tiny community of King Island already had a windfarm in place that had been operating for 15 years. The fact that the island already had wind turbines just never came up?

The owner of the guest house in which the Mortimers stayed has said, ‘We built the house in 2004 and lived there for a year before renting it out as tourist accommodation since then. No one else, apart from David Mortimer, has complained about any problems at the Ettrick house.’44

On 7 October 2013, Mortimer posted a comment on an ABC blog post in which he returned to the same issues. He wrote:

The cases of the Mortimers and the Gages provide an obvious response to those who claim that unhappy wind turbine hosts are contractually gagged from speaking out. They have contracts with wind energy companies and yet they have complained, and have not been penalised for breach of contract.

I have been shown numerous examples of pro forma windfarm hosting contracts from Australia. They do contain clauses about confidentiality. But these nearly always relate to the financial arrangements that have been made between the landowners and the wind companies. The reasons for such confidentiality should be obvious to anyone with any commercial experience. Some wind companies negotiate rental terms with potential turbine hosts that reflect the different electricity-generating potential of different topographical conditions. Some locations are worth more than others, and accordingly there can sometimes be variations in the rental offers that are made to different landowners. As with any commercial transaction, the parties concerned seek to maximise their self-interest. Landowners seek to maximise the rent they can get, and wind companies seek to minimise it. Once a price has been negotiated, companies naturally hope to keep these details confidential so that other landowners do not assume that they will get the same figure.

When the gag clause accusations first began to be made, I spoke with lawyers I know. The unanimous view was that, even if some wind companies did require their contracted turbine hosts to sign gag clauses about ill effects, these would be unenforceable: no contract can override common law rights to redress from negligence.

Michael Holcroft, president of the Law Institute of Victoria, in 2011 told the ABC that courts consider the public interest when ruling on contracts:

In March 2013, the Clean Energy Council published a statement endorsed by 12 wind-energy companies. As can be seen, this public statement repudiated any suggestion that turbine hosts were not free to talk as publicly as they wished about health or noise concerns. Windfarm opponents never refer to this statement.

The problem of falling and stagnant real estate prices in many of Australia’s rural areas is well known. When landowners with low-value property that would be hard to sell see a wealthy energy company moving into an area and paying significant sums in lease payments, it is not surprising that some might see potential for being ‘bought out’ by such companies. Mining companies regularly buy out landowners. When this happens, word can spread fast through the community. I have heard accounts of hopeful complainants giving energy companies lavish ‘shopping lists’ of demands to pay for renovation or relocation. Tellingly, four allegedly unliveable houses near Waubra, where complaining residents were bought out, now house non-complaining occupants. When anti-windfarm leaders move around communities, sometimes with entrepreneurial lawyers, spreading anxiety that the turbines can harm heath, we see a potent combination: poorly informed, worried and angry residents are seeded with the idea that their protests might lead to a payout.

Other complainants appear to see the turbines as symbols of values and movements that they despise: totems of green politics, modernity and urban artifice. I have received many heated emails suggesting I should host a turbine in my inner-city backyard. As I noted earlier in the book, the irony is that for 26 years I’ve lived 300 metres under the main flight path into Sydney airport, 30 metres from a busy road and 200 metres from a railway line. The combined noise is incomparably louder than hundreds of wind turbines. I rather think I wear my fair share of community noise. But some in the bush believe that it is their birthright to be sheltered from any intrusion into their pristine surrounds, the ultimate in NIMBYism. Fortunately, anti-windfarm voices in the bush are in a small minority, as a 2012 CSIRO study shows.48

Abandoned homes and ‘windfarm refugees’

One of the most enduring claims made by anti-windfarm activists is that families have had to ‘abandon their homes’ near windfarms because of the insufferable effects on their health.49 Details are rarely provided but a powerful image remains of lives so desperate that people have walked away from their homes.

I began noticing this claim in my earliest days of following this issue. The Waubra Foundation stated in June 2011 that:

This was repeated in November 2011 by Max Rheese, then executive officer of the Australian Environment Foundation, an anti-windfarm, climate-change denialist group established by the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs. He wrote, ‘More than 20 homes have been abandoned in western Victoria because of Wind Turbine Syndrome’ (my emphasis).51 Rheese later went on to become a senior staff member to Senator David Leyonhjelm, another trenchant enemy of windfarms. By September 2011, Sarah Laurie from the Waubra Foundation had started using stronger language: ‘There are now well over 20 rural families in Australia [my emphasis] who have been forced to leave their homes because of serious health problems they have developed since the turbines commenced operating.’52 A year later, Laurie bumped the number right up, stating in a letter to a NSW politician that ‘wind turbine refugee families now number more than 40’.53

When I saw this sudden leap I immediately wondered if I might be starting to smell the deep fragrance of factoid: a likely baseless claim that if repeated often enough comes to be accepted as true.

So, curious, I wrote to Laurie on 16 November 2012 asking her to send a list of the addresses of these abandoned homes. I wanted to start enquiries in each location to corroborate her claim. I planned to get in touch with local contacts like real-estate agents or the windfarm companies operating the turbines to seek corroboration of each claim about home abandonment.

Laurie replied that she had sent the information in a confidential submission to the Labor senator Doug Cameron, who was chairing the 2012 Senate inquiry into windfarms. Over the phone, a staff member in Cameron’s office confirmed to me that a submission had been received from Laurie, that its contents were confidential, but that the submission contained no names or identifying details of anyone claimed to have abandoned their house.

In an email, Laurie shut down the conversation by writing, ‘As the information was provided to me in confidence, I will not be providing it to you, so please do not ask me again.’ Her claims were thus not open to any scrutiny, often a tell-tale sign of factoid status.

So I set out to try to corroborate her claim that ‘more than 40 families’ have abandoned their homes in Australia because of windfarms.

How did I check?

Six sources were used to search for evidence of claims about abandoned homes. First, I reviewed 2394 submissions made to three parliamentary inquiries on windfarms for any statement from or about people either ‘abandoning’ their homes, moving temporarily or selling up because they had been distressed or made ill by the presence of a windfarm.54 I also searched the anonymously authored, aggressively anti-windfarm website Stop These Things for any account of or reference to abandoned homes or windfarm refugees. This website publishes profiles of people claiming to have been harmed or annoyed by wind-turbine exposure and daily comments from dedicated opponents of windfarms. Publicising emotive profiles of ‘refugees’, if they existed, would be irresistible to the authors of this site. I also emailed 18 known Australian opponents of windfarms and invited them to send any information about allegedly abandoned homes. I then repeated this request to senators Nick Xenophon, John Madigan and Chris Back, who had each publicly referred to home abandonments or ‘refugees’. I searched the Factiva news media database on 23 October 2012 using the search string ‘wind AND farms AND [abandon* OR refugee*]’ for all Australian news sources. Finally, I put word out to a network of colleagues and associates with interest and expertise in windfarms including acousticians, wind industry employees, rural health specialists and environmentalists, that I was seeking to corroborate the abandonment claim and asking for any information about instances of homes being abandoned in Australia. The information obtained from this process consisted of (1) people who had already been publicly identified – generally by their own publicity efforts, and (2) various descriptions of unnamed people said to have abandoned their houses, with information about the windfarm that was said to have prompted them to flee. In the latter cases, I sought to find additional information by contacting the relevant wind company. Below I discuss these cases of so-called home abandonment. Where this information has previously been made public via websites or media coverage, identifiable details are provided. Where information relates to cases that have not been made public, I have kept all identifying information confidential.

What did I find?

Twenty-one emails were sent to known opponents of windfarms, including Senators Xenophon, Madigan and Back. None of the senators replied, despite follow-up emails. One abusive reply was received from an activist who co-ordinates opposition to a planned windfarm, and one reply was received that supplied details about a property whose owners had moved out because of nearby turbines. Table 3.1 summarises all 12 known claims of home ‘abandonment’ due to windfarms in Australia obtained from the six sources described.

Twelve cases (seven in Waubra and five in Toora) where windfarm companies had purchased houses from their owners were not counted as examples of houses being ‘abandoned’. These owners negotiated to sell their properties, sometimes to windfarm developers, in five cases prior to the commencement of the operation of the farms; several of these houses are now used as accommodation for windfarm personnel. One much publicised case at Waubra is that of the Godfreys.55 It is understood that the developer made technical errors in the amenity assessment and an agreed financial settlement was reached after the windfarm began to operate.

In addition, anti-windfarm activist George Papadopoulos (see Chapter 6), who lives 35 kilometres away from the nearest windfarm at Gunning in New South Wales, has claimed sometimes to sleep in his car to escape turbines noise.56 He has also claimed to be able to hear wind turbines from ‘up to 100 kilometres’ away.57 If this were possible, all of the population of Canberra (340,000), Adelaide (1.2 million) and Melbourne (4 million) might be able to hear wind turbine noise58 because of the windfarms within 100 kilometres of these cities (see Figure 6.5). I regarded this claim as sufficiently extreme to not take it seriously. So, using six potential sources of information, I was able to find only 12 examples of families living near seven of Australia’s then 51 windfarms who claimed to have left their homes either permanently or occasionally because of the proximity of windfarms and without any financial settlement or compensation from windfarm companies. Of these, none appears to be a case of true ‘abandonment’ in the sense that the families concerned ‘fled’ their house, unable to sell it. Nine appear to be examples of owners deciding to move out of the house completely or for extended periods, but retaining ownership. In two cases, the owners return to their properties for work during the day, but reside elsewhere.

However, important questions arise about some of these. One informant with many years’ experience in the wind industry remarked that ‘there is almost always more to these stories’. Some may be trying to bring negative publicity to the wind companies concerned in an effort to leverage more lucrative financial settlements. It is common knowledge that when large companies (mining, housing or industrial development) show interest in developing a major project, they can sometimes attract ambit or speculative claims and resort to purchasing properties rather than risk potentially protracted complaints from objectors. Where a property owner would ordinarily have little prospect of selling in a depressed market or because a run-down house is unsalable, the temptation to complain in the hope of being bought out might be predictable.

Many economically struggling rural towns and hamlets have properties like this, with real-estate agents’ windows advertising many long-term unsold properties. The small town of Waterloo in South Australia, for example, is said by windfarm opponents to be a hotbed of abandoned homes. It is. But not for the reasons claimed. Waterloo is a small settlement that is looking very tired. Climate change–denying journalist James Delingpole described it thus in the Australian:

Such towns typically have few if any shops or services, and little employment. Many children on leaving school move away. In such environments, when a large wind-energy company establishes a local windfarm and stories spread of ‘drought-proofing’ lease payments being paid to turbine hosts, it is conceivable that a minority may pursue a strategy of vexatious complaints in order to procure improvements to their property or even an otherwise unlikely sale. Moving away from a house may be a strategy designed to leverage such settlements.

In at least two cases, those who had ‘abandoned’ their houses citing health complaints had histories of medical problems pre-dating the construction of the windfarms. One had been on a disability pension for several years, and another had made a public statement about a serious ongoing brain injury unrelated to and pre-dating the windfarm. One ‘refugee’ is known by those in the community to have moved to a town that has medical facilities needed by a family member. Another family member has since moved into the ‘abandoned’ home after the owner unsuccessfully sought a settlement beyond the market value of the house.

One of those listed in the table as having moved has only part-time work in the area. Most of this person’s work is outside the area and the person is known to have other houses. In this particular case, there are more than 50 houses closer to the windfarm that have not claimed ‘refugee’ status or complained. It is likely that there were other reasons for this family to have left this home.

Another ‘refugee’ has a history of antagonism toward the relevant wind company after his commercial services were declined during the construction of the windfarm. Still another has recently moved back into the windfarm district, building a new house. A frequently complaining couple sold their home on the open market and attributed their departure to their dislike for the windfarm. However, they cannot be said to have ‘abandoned’ the house, having sold it. The new owner is enthusiastic about living near the windfarm and turned down the windfarm developer’s offer to plant trees on the property because she enjoys seeing the turbines through her kitchen window.

In addition to the 12 families shown in Table 3.1, Sarah Laurie has referred to ‘numerous families’ having abandoned their houses near the Toora windfarm in Victoria.60 One house was demolished near the Toora farm and two others were sold on the open market. It is inconceivable that a windfarm company would demolish a house it did not own, so this claim could not refer to an ‘abandoned’ house but to a purchased one. Claims have also been made of other ‘refugees’ in the Macarthur area. However, attempts to corroborate these claims were unsuccessful. It might be argued that despite my being unable to find evidence for any more than 12 families claiming to have abandoned their houses, many more exist but have not made public complaints or sought publicity. How plausible is this? Imagine that your home was subject to some environmental assault so egregious and relentless that you had no option but to abandon your home: walk away from it without sale, because no one would be foolish enough to buy it when they saw what you were enduring. And then try to imagine that, under these circumstances, you never publicly identified yourself. Never protested about what you were experiencing. Never made yourself known to those causing the problem. Never called in the media to report the unfair conditions under which you lived. Never mentioned it in a submission to parliament.

While the first is possible to imagine, the second would be hard to fathom. People at the end of their tether tend to be angry. They have awful stories to tell. They welcome arc lights thrown on their situation so that the injustice might be stopped. Yet this is the situation we are being asked to accept when it comes to claims that Australian windfarms have allegedly driven ‘more than 40’ families to abandon their homes and become ‘windfarm refugees’.

If this were true it would be reasonable to expect that many of the people would not have sought anonymity, but quite the opposite. The injustice of having to leave one’s home without selling it, or being penalised for breaking a lease, could attract media and political attention and perhaps trigger compensation. None of the anti-windfarm activists contacted provided any information about abandoned homes when given the opportunity to do so. If more such cases exist, they would provide important publicity in aid of the anti-windfarm cause.

Industrial developments like highway construction, new airport runways, tunnels and the re-zoning of residential areas for industrial use often attract virulent protest from local residents. Those most affected write complaints, picket councils and parliaments, are interviewed by the media, put signs on their fences and front lawns, and sometimes engage in civil disobedience. They have strong reasons to complain and the last thing they’d want to do is to be timid, seek anonymity and not raise hell.

Here a blog comment I found is apposite, comparing residents openly protesting in Melbourne about the construction of a major road tunnel with claims that ‘more than 40’ families have abandoned houses because of wind turbines:

I concluded that claims about ‘more than 20’, let alone ‘over 40’ home abandonments in Australia are not open to any scrutiny, are highly likely to be without foundation, and should be regarded as factoids until validated. The Waubra Foundation has been a major proponent of this contagious factoid. The foundation even publicised a ‘respite’ program, offering affected residents temporary accommodation elsewhere, an initiative that appears to have now disappeared from its website. A credible hypothesis is that the anti-wind lobby has embellished and inflated the actual number of people leaving homes in order to support their lobbying efforts to frustrate the development of windfarms.

Of particular concern is the way the word ‘refugee’ was used in the service of this issue. Three Senators (Back,62 Madigan63 and Xenophon64), while not repeating the ‘40’ figure, publicly used the expressions ‘abandoned home’ or ‘refugees’. Refugees are people who risk their lives to escape death, persecution and war. The appropriation of this term as an emotive rhetorical device, with the numbers involved exaggerated to increase attention, is frankly odious. If the members of the 2015 Senate inquiry did have ‘confidential knowledge’ of many more people abandoning their homes than I have been able to find evidence for, the matter could be investigated by a judicial investigator such as a retired judge. Such a person could be appointed to investigate the veracity of these claims. Questions to be asked would include whether those who had moved had any other reasons for moving, such as seeking work, eviction from a rented property, or a need to be near medical facilities. The judge could investigate whether any complainants were property owners whose applications to host lucrative turbines were declined because of unsuitable topography, and who then began resenting neighbours whose land was suitable.

Those claiming to have to regularly leave their house for respite from the turbines should of course have no objection to making their home telephone records available to corroborate that no calls were made or taken during the many periods when they claim to have been away. They should also be willing to provide receipts for hotel accommodation or statutory declarations from family and friends who might have put them up on all of these alleged occasions.

Are windfarms the new tobacco, asbestos or thalidomide?

One of the most brutally flogged tropes in contemporary debates about alleged new health risks is the idea that some heinous new agent may turn out to be the new tobacco, asbestos or thalidomide. This argument has three core ingredients.

First, there’s the idea that few ever suspected that these nasties were anything but benign; they were used by many for years to no apparent ill effect, but some intrepid investigators knew better.

Next comes the narrative of the brave whistle-blower, following in the path trodden by Copernicus and later Galileo, who endured the wrath of the church when they challenged the Ptolemaic doctrine of a geocentric, earth-centred universe. These pioneers of true understanding weathered the taunts and ridicule and their truths finally won out. Those highlighting the risks of some new agent see themselves as equally heroic, revolutionary and unappreciated. They are trying to tell us the truth and disbelievers are either myopic conservatives or the running dogs of corporate liars.

Finally, there’s the near-universal contempt for the industries that did all they could to deny that their products were harmful, and an assertion that the new industry is no better: ‘Tobacco and asbestos companies denied the health risks of smoking for decades. We’re seeing the same thing happening now with [insert new problem like windfarms here].’

On 19 May 2015, Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm gave the argument a heavy workout in the Senate inquiry into windfarms, amazingly the third such inquiry in four years. Questioning Andrew Bray of the Australian Wind Alliance, Leyonhjelm got into stride:

It is difficult to know where to begin here. Leyonhjelm’s party has taken ‘tens of thousands’ of dollars from tobacco transnational Philip Morris,66 a company whose products kill up to two-thirds of long-term users. In 2015–16, his Liberal Democrat Party declared a $20,000 donation from Philip Morris Ltd and $90,000 from the Australian Alliance of Retailers,67 a lobbying organisation set up by three tobacco companies.68 With Philip Morris coming in second only to the Chinese National Tobacco Monopoly in annual sales, they win the all-comers silver medal for the company whose products cause the most deaths globally. Leyonhjelm, a caring champion of those claiming to have been harmed by windfarms, is happy to take what has often been called big tobacco’s blood money. Lung cancer is apparently OK, but anxiety about a wind turbine is not. Is that the message here? The association of smoking with disease can be traced back to as early as 1912, when Isaac Adler published what historians recognise as the first strong connection between lung cancer and smoking.69 It was not until the early 1950s, when the first serious case-control studies of smoking were published in the USA70 and England,71 that the association rapidly came to be acknowledged as causal, ten years later. Twenty-six years ago, in 1990, the US surgeon-general said: ‘It is safe to say that smoking represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever investigated in the history of biomedical research.’72 The World Health Organization reports that between 1995 and 2007, 92,253 deaths from asbestos-caused mesothelioma were reported in 83 nations. In Australia in 2014, there were 641 mesothelioma deaths, with deaths predicted to continue to rise until 2021. The prevalence of Australians living with the disease is put at some 18,000.73

By comparison, the evidence that windfarms cause direct harm to anyone is of homeopathic strength. There are no documented instances or coronial reports of anyone ever dying from exposure to a wind turbine, other than rare industrial accidents during turbine construction. As the prominent Australian science and health commentator Karl Kruszelnicki succinctly put it, ‘the science is absolutely clear that the only health effects of wind turbines is that if they fall on you.’

In June 2015 Leyonhjelm wrote in the Australian, ‘there is already quite a lot of evidence [about the health effects of windfarms] and it is building.’74 This is utter nonsense. As we will consider in the next chapter, there have now been 25 reviews of the evidence on whether windfarms harm health.75 All conclude that the evidence is very poor for any direct relationship. Most conclude that people who do not like windfarms, or who have been exposed to frightening stories, or who are consumed with anger about neighbours getting big money for hosting turbines when they cannot, can worry themselves sick. Sickeningly, such people are being used as pawns by ideologues opposed to renewable energy. Leyonhjelm is a man totally inexperienced in any area of health or medical research. He is a man who infamously believes that armed citizens can prevent the sort of gun violence that we see in one of the most heavily armed societies on earth: the USA.76 His understanding of the history of tobacco industry denials is just as absurd. The tobacco and asbestos industries denied the health problems of their products for many decades after the science was clear that smoking and asbestos killed. The wind industry denies that its turbines directly harm people because, as 25 reviews have confirmed since 2003, there’s no good evidence that they do. That’s a fundamental difference. Any Logic 101 undergraduate understands that it does not follow that any company disagreeing with accusations that their products are harmful are mendacious liars.

Windfarm opponents have grasped the straw that the evidence that wind turbines are dangerous is poor, and argue that we therefore need to invest in research that they just know will eventually prove their point. There’s also ‘poor evidence’ that UFOs, the Loch Ness monster and leprechauns exist, but no serious scientific body thinks investing research in such claims is sensible, other than the politically pressured NHMRC, which in 2015 allocated $2.5 million into wind and health research.77