A possible noise criterion for wind farms

Abstract

Opposition to wind farm noise is not abating and shows no sign of doing so in the future. In a January 2017 paper in Sound and Vibration, Hessler, Leventhal, Walker and Schomer come together to report that independently they have come to about the same conclusion for a proper threshold of wind turbine noise. The same A-Weighted criterion has shown to come up in a variety of independent ways. This paper is not for pie in the sky desires for no sound. Rather, it attempts to map sound from a common source such as road traffic noise to the sound from wind farms. We do this calculation in two ways: using percent highly annoyed set to 6.5%, roughly 58 DNL dB for road traffic. In the second method, we developed the CTL for the comparative sources and it is the difference in CTL that shows the adjustment from one source to the other. Our conclusion is that the criterion for wind turbines should be 36-38 dB(A).