Good news for homeowners tilting at windmills! Installing wind turbines or living near wind farms won't noticeably lower their property values, according to a government-funded study released this week.
"Neither the view of wind energy facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of nearby homes," report author Ben Hoen said in a press release.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analyzed almost 7,500 single-family home sales in nine different states between 1996 and 2007. It says the study is the most comprehensive ever on the impact of U.S. wind projects on residential property values.
The study comes as more communities consider such projects. Already, it says, wind turbines and farms provide 30,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity. Their soaring towers, often hundreds of feet tall, have led many people to debate, however, whether they depreciate property values.
"No matter how we looked at the data, the same result kept coming back – no evidence of widespread impacts," Hoen said.
Co-author Mark Thayer, chairman of the economics department at San Diego State University, said other studies have shown that home sale prices are somewhat affected if the property is near conventional power plants or high voltage transmission lines.
Thayer added: "The same cannot be said for wind energy facilities, at least given our sample of transactions."
