Ocean Turbines Face Falmouth Still Standing Wind Road Block

Town of Falmouth Insistence To Keep Turbines Standing Present A Road Block To Ocean Wind

Falmouth Turbines Present 5th Amendment Issues On Ocean Wind Landfall

The 5th Amendment imposes restrictions on the government and mandates due process of law.

In March of 2020, the Falmouth Select Board met with ocean wind turbine contractors who plan to install ocean electric cables and a substation that handles over one gigawatt in power. In the past, the board greeted wind turbine renewable energy with a great deal of enthusiasm spending eight years on eleven lawsuits and appeals over the two town-owned wind turbines.

The Massachusetts courts determined in 2017 the land-based wind turbines are a nuisance and shut them down. The wind turbines remain standing in defiance of the town's own zoning regulations.

The onshore substation and electric transmission route will have an effect on some of the 32,000 mostly summer residents of the town. It's unknown whose residential property will be affected in the latest wind turbine fiasco. You can take it to the bank residential homeowners like peace and quiet.

A Falmouth plaintiff could allege that the town or state government’s development of a wind energy power plant or electric cable project on its own property will interfere with the ability of other owners to use and enjoy their properties. Under the 5th Amendment, the government is required to pay just compensation to residents.

Winning against the wind industry takes tenacity, patience, and perseverance. In Falmouth, this combination helped up to 200 local residents regain their property rights.

The town installed two 1.65 megawatt wind turbines each generating 110 decibels of noise each within a thousand feet of homes set in, once perfectly peaceful, idyllic rural countryside. The two turbines producing up to 113 decibels of noise caused the incessant turbines generated low-frequency noise and infrasound literally drove neighbors sick, for years.

Note # --Neighbors complained of disturbed sleep, headaches, tinnitus (ear ringing), and a sense of quivering or vibration, nervousness, rapid heartbeat, nausea, difficulty with concentration, memory loss, irritability. ...

In Falmouth, once the wind turbine fight began, there was no going back until the homeowners won.

Take a small Massachusetts vacation town, add two massive commercial wind turbines, mix with hubris and arrogance and you have a perfect recipe for disaster now add a gigawatt power station and overhead electric cables to the mix?

In the beginning, there was the promise that ten million dollars worth of wind turbines would help Falmouth save on electric power costs and unite the community in an effort to purportedly save the planet and stop the ocean from taking homes.

That was then in 2009, this is now in 2020. How much more will town meeting pay?

For eight years locals have driven in some cases to the point of suicide by incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infra-sound. But they didn’t take it lying down. Oh, no they spent their life savings fighting the two types of noise and shadow flicker. Now a power plant and high voltage overhead high voltage wires?

Dogged and persistent, local residents lawyered up, and, after years of battling, the ill-fated turbines were supposed to finally come down in 2017.

Falmouth Town Meeting in 2019 granted 2.5 million and more down the road to move the old gear-driven wind turbines out of town The spending continues.

Now, the wind proponents behind the project and the politicians that helped promote it are being grilled over the $10,000,000.00 that was squandered on a project that’s turned out to be one that the wind industry would rather be forgotten. ( No permits for the 110 decibel turbines)

The Massachusetts land-based wind turbine agenda of 2000 megawatts of land-based wind power by 2020 ended in Falmouth.

The Falmouth ocean wind turbine substation and power cables could prove to be detrimental to the future of the ocean wind turbine agenda.