Posts Tagged ‘wind’

New York Noise

After over two years of work, we are glad to say that the final report for our project Wind Turbine-Related Noise in Western New York has been published.  Funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and co-produced with EPRI and Colden Corporation, the study presents a detailed and long-term look at noise levels and resident satisfaction near a modern, utility-scale wind power facility in Wyoming County, NY.

Wind Turbines

The findings of the study fill a gap in the available wind turbine noise research specific to New York State, and include a separate Syracuse University policy paper with specific and actionable advice for a non-technical public policy audience.  Both the Final Report (13-03) and the Policy Paper (13-03b) can be found at the NYSERDA R&D site, and we plan to present the project at the Wind Turbine Noise 2013 conference this August in Denver, Colorado.

INTER-NOISE 2012 in NYC

This coming Sunday through Wednesday (August 19-22, 2012) brings INTER-NOISE 2012 to New York City, the 41st International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering.  We are excited to be presenting two of our favorite projects during the conference: our Subcat Music Studios project in Syracuse, and our contributions to an ongoing study of wind turbine noise in western New York State.

 

The theme of this year’s conference (the largest ever held!) is Quieting the World’s Cities, an especially relevant topic for a conference held in the heart of Times Square.  A free Community Noise Public Outreach workshop will be held on Wednesday 8/22 from 8:30 am – 1:45 pm at the Marriott Marquis, including presentations and discussion on the NYC Noise Control Code and noise in general as a community concern.  A top-notch panel of experts and officials has been assembled for this free workshop, and anyone with an interest in community noise (which should include almost anyone living in New York City) will find it enlightening!

Clean, green, noise machines

Those big, graceful wind turbine power plants dotting the countryside may be a great source of clean power, but they can also represent a source of noise and annoyance to their immediate neighbors.  In a quiet rural area, the whoosh-whoosh noise of a large turbine (some exceeding 300 feet from ground to wingtip) can be audible thousands of feet away.  Several recent epidemiological studies have shown that annoyance from wind turbine noise is greater than that from other environmental sources (such as highways) at an equal noise level.  This discrepancy is likely influenced by unrelated factors (e.g. blocked views), but the continuing push for green energy requires an equal effort to research wind turbine noise and its impact on the health of people nearby.

We recently published the results of a detailed wind turbine noise study in the peer-reviewed acoustics journal Acta Acustica, in conjunction with our colleagues at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. We approached the disparity in annoyance by starting at the source: investigating the accuracy of methods for predicting the noise from a wind turbine in the first place.  Such methods are the basis for designing and regulating wind turbine sites, but necessarily simplify complex factors such as wind and temperature influence on sound.

After an extensive campaign of hundreds of field measurements (in the beautiful Skåne countryside) and days of computer simulation, we found that at a relatively short receiver distance, wind and similar factors were not significantly affecting the sound transmission path—the turbines are simply too tall for wind to influence levels nearby on the ground.  Instead, wind and temperature fluctuation influence the amount of noise generated at the turbine itself, and may do so in ways that aren’t always accounted for in current prediction methods.  As always, further research is needed!

Wind turbine

Wind turbine noise measurement in Skåne, southern Sweden