Abstract
Considering the wide growth of the wind turbine market over the last decade as well as their increasing power size, more and more potential conflicts have arisen in society due to the noise radiated by these plants. Our goal was to determine whether the annoyance caused by wind farms is related to aspects other than noise. To accomplish this, an auditory experiment on the recognition of wind turbine noise was conducted to people with long experience of wind turbine noise exposure and to people with no previous experience to this type of noise source. Our findings demonstrated that the trend of the auditory recognition is the same for the two examined groups, as far as the increase of the distance and the decrease of the values of sound equivalent levels and loudness are concerned. Significant differences between the two groups were observed as the distance increases. People with wind turbine noise experience showed a higher tendency to report false alarms than people without experience.
Highlights
Over the last few years climate change has triggered global concern leading to public awareness and policies regarding sustainable energy provision [1]
The ANOVA on the noise detection ratings showed that the capacity to discriminate the wind farm noise was influenced by the Group, F(1, 38) = 4.421, p = 0.042, η2p = 0.104, the Distance, F(5190) =
The mean comparison revealed that participants of the familiar group (M = 0.75) were more prone to identify the wind farm noise than participants of the control group (M = 0.66)
Summary
Over the last few years climate change has triggered global concern leading to public awareness and policies regarding sustainable energy provision [1]. Targets concerning a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emission from 1990 levels, 20% increase in the consumption of energy produced from renewable resources and a 20% improvement in energy efficiency [2]. Under the framework of Renewable Energy [3], the European Commission established measures to provide 23.5% of the electricity and 12% of the overall primary consumption by means of renewable energy sources [4]. Nowadays the development of renewable energy installations is growing rapidly [5], resulting in a remarkable number of innovative applications of alternative energy sources [6]. Wind power development is one of the most technically advanced renewable energy technologies and wind farms, as electricity generators, are widely expanding in Europe [7], with an increasing number and size of wind turbines [8]. Wind turbine installations provide profitable investments, under an environmental-friendly concept [9]
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