Quote:
Originally Posted by forfismum
i can't see that it would be reasonable to have to open and close curtains,blinds or windows to suit the intermittent nature of this beast.
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I said that SOME PEOPLE decide it is reasonable. I'm not aware of any cases where people have been forced to endure flicker against there will. The only case I can think of was in Kirklees where the council errected 3 (the larger end of micro sized) wind turbines on a roof of a council building, in an urban area, close to a major road (but the turbines were too small to fall onto anything other than the roof they were pmounted on). On occasion the light reflected of a building (or something similar) and caused filcker in an office around the corner. As it was not within a direct line of sight this effect had been unforseen. The matter was reported and investigated. The times that the flicker would occur were easily predictable and the office workers decided that they were happy to close the blinds during these periods. As far as I am aware they could have taken the matter further if they had wanted to. The errection of the wind turbines was a trial and they were a type that can easily be removed (unlike the 2MW sized devices).
The intermitancy of flicker isn't due to intermitent operation of wind turbines, It's due to the movement of the Earth relative to the sun and the rotation of the earth about it's axis. You can't get flicker at night because there's no sun to reflect off the blades. Flicker only occurs when the wind turbine is in the path that the rays travel from the sun to the viewer, kind of like when the moon causes a solar eclipse. Models of the sun's 'path' across the sky are reliable enough to predict the probability of such occurances.
Also I was under the impression that epilepsy was causes by lights flashing at certain high frequencies. It is possible to control the rotational frequencies of the large commecrical wind turbines just as they can prevent them rotating in any windspeeds that are found to exceed acceptable noise limits during operation. I'm not aware of anybody in the UK deliberately ignoring a potential flicker issue once it has been identified. I'd certainly be interested to see any evidence you can find to the contrary.
If you have had a look at the site, how far away is the wind turbine from the property? How tall is the wind turbine? What are your impressions of the noise that it emits?
Have you checked with the local planning department to see if they have planning permission?