Light Pollution and Wind Turbine Flicker Effect

In addition to Turbine noise pollution, turbines cause light pollution and other everyday and all-night problems. Shadow flicker from wind turbine rotor spin causes people to become dizzy, nauseated, or lose their balance. At certain speeds they pose the potential risk of inducing photosensitive seizures.

Even at a mile distant turbine rotors cause shadow flicker a disruptive, repetitive motion that washes the walls and windows of homes as often as the rotors spin. It has been equated to motion sickness, but it can be worse.

Wind turbine syndrome (WTS) is a cluster of clinical symptoms first formally identified by British physician Amanda Harry, MD, and subsequently given the name Wind Turbine Syndrome and a patho-physiological explanation by New York State physician and researcher Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD.

WTS refers to the discrete constellation of symptoms that some people experience when living near wind turbines, symptoms that Dr. Pierpont and other clinicians assert are caused chiefly by turbine low-frequency noise and vibration and shadow flicker affecting the body’s various balance organs, including the utricle and saccule (vestibular organs) of the inner ear.

Wind Syndrome Symptoms

Pierpont has identified the following cluster of symptoms among many people living near wind turbines. In Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment (Santa Fe, NM: K-Selected Books, in press) she explains how these seemingly disparate symptoms result from turbine low frequency noise scrambling the body’s balance, motion, and position sensors.

Sleep disturbance

Headache

Tinnitus (pronounced “tinn-uh-tus”: ringing or buzzing in the ears)

Ear pressure

Dizziness (a general term that includes vertigo, lightheadedness, sensation of almost fainting, etc.)

Vertigo (clinically, vertigo refers to the sensation of spinning, or the room moving)

Nausea

Visual blurring

Tachycardia (rapid heart rate)

Irritability

Problems with concentration and memory

Panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering, which arise while awake or asleep

According to Pierpont’s research papers and book, people at notable risk for WTS are those with migraine disorder and a history of balance and motion sensitivity (such as car-sickness and sea-sickness).

Dr. Harry (Great Britain) and Dr. Pierpont (USA) have based their research on clinical case series and both have called for large-scale government-sponsored epidemiological studies to definitively establish WTS as a full-blown disease state.

Dr. Nina Pierpont’s report has received affirmative peer reviews from the following:

Professor Robert May, Baron May of Oxford OM AC Kt FRS. Professor May holds a professorship jointly at Oxford University and Imperial College, London, and is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. President of the Royal Society (2000-05), Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and Head of the UK Office of Science and Technology (1995-2000), and member of the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee (an independent body established by the Climate Change Bill, to advise on targets and means of achieving them).
F. Owen Black, MD, Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Senior Scientist and Director of Neuro-Otology Research, Legacy Health System, Portland, Oregon.
Jerome Haller, MD, Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics (retired 2008), Albany Medical College, Albany, New York.
Joel F. Lehrer, MD, Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Former Professor of Otolaryngology, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (NYC), currently Clinical Professor of Otolaryngology, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey.
Ralph V. Katz, DMD, MPH, PhD, Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology & Health Promotion, New York University College of Dentistry.
Henry S. Horn, PhD, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Associate of the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University.
Robert Y. McMurtry, MD, Emeritus Professor and Dean of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Western Ontario Schulich School of Medicine. In 1999 McMurtry became the first Cameron Visiting Chair at Health Canada — a post carrying the responsibility for providing policy advice to the Deputy Minister and Minister of Health for Canada. McMurtry is the founding Assistant Deputy Minister of the Population and Public Health Branch of Health Canada.