As wind energy continues to grow as an alternative to fossil fuels, studies and media reports have suggested wind turbines can cause all manner of health problems, from sleep disturbances and irritability to outcomes as serious as suicide.
To determine the veracity of these claims, Osea Giuntella, associate professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Economics, worked with Doug Almond of Columbia University and Niklas Rott of the University of Augsburg on a joint study looking at people’s health before and after the installation of turbines nearby.
Their analysis, published May 19 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that despite some public concern and reports to the contrary, turbines used to produce wind energy are not responsible for any detectable adverse health outcomes.
“Studies on wind turbines that show negative effects on health do get more attention from the media. The public debate is polarized, and the studies driving that polarization aren’t always the most rigorous ones,” Giuntella said. “When we looked at the wind turbine health literature, the papers getting the most citations and media coverage were overwhelmingly correlational analyses reporting negative effects. Our data, drawn from residents of more than 120,000 households living near wind turbines at a typical exposure distance over more than a decade, simply don’t show the kind of health harms that fears about turbines would predict.”
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