A new study released by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reveals that the view of wind farms does not appear to have a significant effect on the sale of houses.

The study investigated the sales of 7,500 homes between 1996 and 2007 located within 10 miles of 24 operational wind farms. These sales included homes within a mile of wind farms. Specifically, neither the view of the wind farm facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities is found to have any consistent, measurable and statistically significant effect on home sales.

The study concludes that ‘although the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes have been or could be negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, they are either too small and too infrequent to result in any widespread observable impact’.

Criticism is made in the study to other surveys looking at the possible impact of wind energy projects on house prices. It claims that only a few studies included field visits to homes to determine wind turbine visibility and collect other important information about the home e.g. the quality of the scenic vista.