Poland’s governing Law and Justice Party plans to require new wind turbines be built a mile away from homes and schools, citing concerns about rising electricity bills, reducing costly green energy subsidies, aesthetics and health issues.
Poland installed more wind turbines in 2015 than any other European country except Germany. The sheer number of turbines has created a domestic political backlash against them.
“There’s a number of reasons our country isn’t run by wind,” Dan Kish, the senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Where people are familiar with wind power, they tend to develop contempt for it fairly rapidly. Wind turbines are not aesthetically desirable and make no sense from an economic perspective. It only makes sense to politicians who take checks from green energy companies. It ain’t all its cracked up to be.”
Naturally, wind lobbyists in Poland are panicking about the potential law. Poland’s plans “will tie projects up in red tape and make life difficult for developers by imposing arbitrary rules that serve no other purpose than to prevent wind turbine deployment,” Oliver Joy, a spokesman for the European Wind Energy Association, told Bloomberg.
Even in comparatively progressive places like Vermont or the United Kingdom, wind farms tend to be aggressive opposed by local residents.
One of most common complaints about wind turbines by local residents is that they cause “flickering” when the sun is behind their blades. This is generally agreed to be incredibly annoying and there’s evidence that it can cause headaches, sleep disorders and anxiety and depression symptoms in people who live nearby.
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