But they do. And anybody with half a brain cell knows it could not be otherwise, especially with reports of people throughout the province being unable to sleep because of the noise and vibration from poorly sited wind turbine developments, AND the fact that wind developers are having to buy people out because their homes have been rendered uninhabitable, due to proximity to wind turbines.
The Canadian Wind Energy Association knew it had to act when property owners affected by wind turbine installations were going to the Assessment Review Board and so sometime last year they contracted with Ontario real estate appraisers George Canning and John L. Simmons to do a study and produce a report.
The report was just released and imagine this: it claims there are no effects on property values from industrial wind turbines. Oh wait, what they said was “It could not be said that rural residential houses located in a viewshed sold for lower prices.”
In other words, just being able to see wind turbines was not a factor. No mention of noise or vibration or shadow flicker.
The report is deeply, deeply flawed for many reasons. The authors used four different methods to get to their specious conclusion, and the first three of them didn’t work. As Amherst Island’s Wayne Gulden writes, they employed a regression analysis which is questionable anyway, used too small a sample, and used too wide a range (some properties were more than five miles away from the wind turbines).
Gulden: “Canning sings the praises of regression analyses, runs his numbers and–quelle horreur–comes up with viz properties selling for almost 13 % less than no-viz properties. …if Canning stopped here CanWEA would never have published this study. So Canning goes to step number two. He massages the data, finding 20 no-viz homes that most closely match the 20 biz homes. He runs his numbers again and–another quelle horreur–the difference is 9%.”
It gets complicated here with talk about standard deviation etc., but basically what happened was Canning and Simmons kept running data through various computations until the sample was so small and the margin for error so large that it meant nothing, which they took to mean, there is no effect on value.
As Wayne Gulden remarks, in order to properly look at the property value, the appraisers would have to have looked at sales before 2004, which was when the project was announced. And how many of their study properties was that? Two. Out of 14.
Once again, bad science. We note that in their letter of transmittal, the appraisers thank a company called The IBI Group for providing them with information. IBI is a member of CanWEA and has done numerous projects for wind developers including Enbridge. So, we’re just absolutely positive the information given to Mr Canning and Mr Simmons (and since when do appraisers need to be fed information?) was objective and unbiased.
We could go on but what’s sad about this is that this report–although, curiously, it is not available on the CanWEA website–has been sent out to municipalities as “proof” that wind developments will not affect property values and the tax base. What is also sad is that two professional men who have had long careers in the appraisal business (Simmons started in 1962)and who now are still working, were co-opted by the greedy, mendacious wind lobby. In the sunset of their careers, the Canning-Simmons report will be infamous for its flawed methodology and simplistic, erroneous conclusion.
To get in touch with the North Gower Wind Action Group (we are not it) email northgowerwindactiongroup@yahoo.ca
You can read Wayne Gulden’s critique of the report at
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