Falmouth Wind 1 KEMA Special Permit

Falmouth Wind 1 KEMA Special Permit

The Town of Falmouth understood the risk of going forward with NO Special Permit for Falmouth Wind 1.

KEMA provided a feasibility study for the Town of Falmouth.

Falmouth Community Wind Project Site Screening Report

Apr 19, 2005 – FALMOUTH SITE SCREENING REPORT

This report was prepared by KEMA ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT, INC
and funded by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative aka today the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center

The date of the report April 19, 2005

The report says a Special permit is needed . Falmouth Wind 1 Turbine

Falmouth Community Wind Project Site Screening Report April 19,2005

The date is important for this report April 19,2005

Page 28 of the April 19, 2005 site review says : 6.2.2 a special permit is needed for the wind turbine

Whether the judge decrees so, or not, it is a mistake not to have a full, honest and informed appraisal of the risks and benefits of renewable energy projects, as with any infrastructure.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled against the Town of Falmouth.

A major goal of the majority of feasibility studies including KEMA’s was to establish very clearly what permitting hurdles there were, and what zoning changes might be required easements or variances needed or deeds to be checked. The research can be quite thorough.

Again the KEMA report said : A Special Permit is needed for Falmouth Wind 1

We know for example that the wording of Falmouth’s by-law intending to limit wind turbine noise levels to 40 dB was incorrectly or ambiguously worded from the feasibility study for a private owned wind turbine in Falmouth in 2005.

Why wasn’t this fixed? It was !

It would have been consistent with the Swedish limits, and if the practice of allowing about a 5 or 6 dB margin of safety, common for almost all Dutch and Swedish turbines, were applied Falmouth would not be in such a pickle. It would have helped if the Danish-Swedish method of sound prediction specific to turbines and their elevated sound source and accounting for the longer propagation path of low frequencies were used.

Falmouth did eventually change its bylaw today to 6 decibels.

We also know that from a letter released through the FOIA, Freedom of information Act that all those involved with the construction of Falmouth Wind 1 were well aware the turbine would break state noise regulations hence the reason for not obtaining a Special Permit.

Noise impacts were well know in 2005 -Mattapoisett residents had been warned in their feasibility study about two distinct types of noise. The warning about the two distinct types of noise regulatory and human annoyance were dropped from the Falmouth studies because the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center was stuck with two Vestas V 82 commercial wind turbines.

Falmouth went for the bait and got hooked the rest is history. A history with NO Special Permit !

The same year in 2005 Vestas started getting neighbor complaints and shortly after van den Berg investigated the basis of Dutch farmers’ complaints of sleep disruption when first exposed to the dramatically increased scale of modern era, industrial wind turbines. His fundamental contribution is that wind shear is not a static function of terrain, but rather highly dynamic, worse at night and has tremendous consequences for wind turbine noise impacts.
He also showed the marked variability of turbine noise levels of the time scale closer to human perception, especially in the lowest frequency range missed by A-weighting.

If the decision had not been made to forego the Special Permit process in Falmouth , and along with it detailed analysis of acoustic and shadow flicker impacts, there is a good probability that what had been learned in the meantime could have avoided the multi-million dollar mistake Falmouth now needs to rectify.

The Special Permit process would have questioned the appropriateness of the Vestas V 82 turbine model selected.

To this day everyone blames the severity of impacts in Falmouth on the residents living around the turbines who were the original stakeholders.


Energy Committee Minutes for: 03-28-2005
Hard to read? Click here to view Minutes alone. (Opens in a new window)

Monday, March 28, 2005 10:00 Meeting in Selectmen Room, Town Hall, Falmouth, to discuss the KEMA draft site screening report of March 2.

John Abe presented the summary of the report, the first of the two-part feasibility study of utilizing the wind at the wastewater treatment plant, and asked for comments and questions about what Falmouth wants for the final report.

At the end of the meeting he asked for all our comments to be sent to him by next week, Friday (Apr 8) ; he will then submit an outline for the feasibility study and a timeline for further discussion from the town and for involving the community.

Meeting was attended by:
John Abe, KEMA, Inc, Author of the Site Screening Report (Feasibility Study)
Dick Elrick, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, Sponsor of the Feasibility Study
George Calise, Engineer for the Town of Falmouth
Ahmed Mustafa, Chair, Falmouth Selectmen
Kevin Murphy, Falmouth Selectmen
Bob Whritenour, Falmouth Town Administrator
Megan Amsler. Co-Chair, Falmouth Energy Committee
Joan Muller, Co-Chair, Falmouth Energy Committee
Ursula Boyce, Falmouth Energy Committee
Joe Hackler, Falmouth Energy Committee Advisor
Dick Koehler, Falmouth Energy Committee Advisor

Falmouth took a gamble and lost. The town lost the health and property rights of its citizens and misused public funds to use the tie up the Massachusetts Court System to achieve a renewable energy goal that deprives citizens constitutional rights.