Are wind turbines dragging down your property value? New study has surprising findings

As wind farms continue to crop up across Oklahoma, nearby landowners worry that their property values will tank with those massive, and potentially unwelcome, new neighbors.

But a new nationwide study that analyzed data from 300 million home sales and 60,000 wind turbines found that a wind farm's impact on home values is much lower than previously thought, CNN reports. Instead, there's about a 1% drop on average for a home with at least one wind turbine within six miles.

If a home is less than five miles from a turbine, the study's authors found, there's a higher impact on the home's price. But that negative impact to property value, the study finds, “diminishes and eventually disappears” within a decade.

More: New wind farm is set for Pontotoc County, southeast of OKC

Study asks, can you see the wind turbine from your house? How much?

To conduct the study, researchers built a database mapping out the distance between homes in the U.S. and wind turbines from 1997 to 2020.

The goal, a researcher told CNN, was to really understand how much wind turbine a homeowner could see from their house, and if that amount affected a home's price.

Researchers calculated if you can see the turbine from the home, or if there's a mountain or trees in the way, for example. Then they compared the changes in value on that property to other houses in the same area where residents cannot see the wind turbine.

Researchers also noted that when a wind turbine was farther away, it would appear smaller and have less impact on the view from the home. For example, a wind turbine five miles away appeared roughly the same size as an aspirin tablet held with an outstretched arm, while a turbine one mile away would appear the size of a golf ball.

Researchers find low impact on fewer properties than expected

The conclusion they reached was that there's a 1% drop of home values with a visible wind turbine, with a greater effect on homes closer to more wind turbines, but that drop in value is no longer detectable after the 20 years covered in their research.

Also, researchers noted that there aren't very many people who live very short distances from a turbine — the study recorded fewer than 250,000 housing transactions within a mile of a wind turbine.

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that many wind energy projects often have setback ordinances, which allow homeowners to work with wind farm managers to agree on a placement that works for both parties.

As wind energy projects continue to expand across the Midwest, more property owners will be faced with new wind farms seeking to lease land to construct turbines next door. In many cases, farmers lease their land out to utility companies and are paid for that space, but the hope, researchers told CNN, is that this data could help property owners weigh that decision.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Study finds wind turbines have little effect on property values