What actually bothers people about wind turbines

In the interest of getting our fair share of aesthetic controversy, we’ve been reading Zane Kasher’s job market paper on wind farm construction and the effect on local residents. While the paper focuses on implications for taxing wind farms - Kashner finds taxes actually help wind farms get built in all but the most sparsely-populated areas, since it’s easier for developers to compensate locals for the downside - he also finds a 12% average drop in home prices within 3 miles of a wind farm. Since most auditory effects are within 2 miles, we wondered what the academic literature has to say about the aesthetics of wind farms. Beyond the entangled moral and political judgments that influence perception, there’s a few interesting takeaways. First, aesthetic responses vary a lot by geography (Spain and Sweden seem not to mind wind farms; Korea and Germany are less enthused on the aesthetics). Interestingly, some of that variation might trace back to the literal background - Molnarova et al. 2012 and Lothian 2008 both find that people like the look of wind farms better in degraded landscapes than in more scenic ones (an interesting wrinkle for the land-value externalities in Kashner’s wind paper, if more expensive homes cluster in baseline-prettier environments). Offshore, the question is much simpler: distance from shore dominates everything else (Ladenburg 2009; Cranmer et al. 2022 find indifference sets in beyond ~10 nautical miles). Finally, blinking aviation obstruction lights are a big - but pretty cheaply avoidable - driver of annoyance (aircraft-detection lighting systems can keep turbines dark ~95% of the night, and costs are estimated at just $1-2m for a single wind farm).