Wind turbine syndrome, a condition that researchers thought dead and buried years ago, is rising from the grave thanks to a series of sketchy research papers – and partly due to the Australian Senate.
Last week, the Senate called for more research to be done into the health impact of wind turbines generally, as one of the recommendations from its inquiry into climate mis-information and dis-information.
But Australian research may already have the answers about infrasound, the pulsating, very low frequency sound waves created by turbine blades – and also the ocean.
The resurgence of infrasound within anti-renewable energy groups is bemusing researchers who did those studies, who say it’s a “scientific dead end”.
And yet the issue is returning as anti-wind groups revive old claims and back them with new studies that allege links between turbines and hundreds of symptoms and diseases.
What is wind turbine syndrome
The term “wind turbine syndrome” was coined in 2009.
It is the idea that the pulsating sound waves below 20 hertz and 50-70 decibels, which is well outside the range of human hearing, cause health problems when specifically caused by wind turbines.
A 2020 book by Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichten attributed 247 different symptoms and diseases to wind turbines.
These cover everything from sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, tachycardia, high blood pressure, sight impairment, diabetes, chest-tightening, and nausea, as well as “difficulty remembering dreams, inability to think clearly”.
There is no strong scientific evidence directly linking turbine noise, or infrasound from turbines, to any of these health conditions. Nor infrasound from air conditioners, traffic, planes, the ocean, or any other source of modern day very low frequency sound waves.
Flinders University respiratory and sleep physiologist Peter Catcheside says audible noise from turbines can be a problem for sleep, but beliefs are more problematic.
“It’s a bit like insomniacs, thinking they’re not going to sleep very well and then they don’t sleep very well. It’s the same sort of phenomena,” he tells Renew Economy.
A 2022 report by then-Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner (AEIC) commissioner Andrew Dyer noted that about half of the 97 complaints about working wind farms to that year related to health but only a “very small number” agreed to provide evidence.
“In all of these cases, the root cause of the stated health issue was not attributable to the wind farm,” the report says.
Instead, the commissioner worried that people aren’t seeking help for treatable illnesses because they are instead, possibly incorrectly, attributing the cause to wind turbines.
Debunked, again
But the research is already there to debunk these health claims, if not entirely available yet in a published, peer reviewed format.
In 2023, a blinded, randomised controlled trial – the gold standard of medical testing on humans – by the Woolcock Institute in Sydney found infrasound had no effect at all on sleep or health.
Woolcock researcher Nathaniel Marshall was bemused when Renew Economy called asking about infrasound.
“[It’s a] scientific dead end, because it flat out did nothing to people. If you look at the paper, apart from the participants in the study we also had a lot of staff who were exposed to infrasound and none of us felt sick either,” he says.
“Where do you take it, when you’ve given people this much infrasound and nothing changed?”
The Woolcock study exposed 37 noise-sensitive but otherwise healthy adults to 72 hours of infrasound recordings, at a sound pressure of 90 decibels from a wind farm and traffic noise.
“You can test it and we did and it didn’t do anything,” Marshall says.
There were criticisms of the study when it was published, but Marshall says they went to many lengths to design the study so it tested every claim made about wind turbine syndrome.
They even ran some of the study criteria past Waubra Foundation founder Peter Mitchell, who was instrumental in pushing the idea of wind turbine syndrome in Australia, and he approved of what they were trying to find.
One criticism was that at 72 hours of exposure it wasn’t long enough. Marshall counters by saying people with wind turbine syndrome told the researchers that symptoms such as vertigo, nausea, and elevated blood pressure start immediately.
“We think it was a reasonably powerful exposure… [the sound level] was selected to be equivalent to one of the loudest recordings he ever had hitting the outside of someone’s house,” Marshall says.
“We couldn’t find anyone who reacted to it, no one got sick or felt terrible.”
In an email to Renew Economy, Ken Mattsson, the lead researcher on a Swedish paper which has become a new reference point for anti-wind campaigners, said the Woolcock study didn’t include exposure to “realistic, pulsating infrasound signals,” or use people who claimed to have wind turbine syndrome.
It’s worth noting that the ocean also generates the same kind of pulsing, very low frequency sound waves as turbines and these have been clocked as far as 200 km inland.
A study that included those elements was done around the same time by Flinders University.
“We found no discernible physiological response,” says Catcheside, who was involved in the work.
Catcheside’s team is sitting on data that shows infrasound has no effect on sleep at all.
It remains unpublished after the study lost funding, but the results are available through a conference paper, No discernible effect of wind farm infrasound exposure on electroencephalographic markers of sleep disturbance, given to the International Conference on Wind Turbine Noise Europe in June 2023.
The study tested 68 people over seven nights using electroencephalographic (EEG) markers of sleep disturbance.
On one of those nights, the participants were exposed to randomised, three minute long exposures of full-spectrum wind farm noise and to 71 decibel wind farm infrasound alone, where the audible noises had been filtered out leaving just the pulsing infrasonic waves.
Four groups were recruited: one group was of people living within 10km of a turbine and self-reported sleep problems they attributed to the wind farm, and another were people who also lived within 10km of a turbine but didn’t have sleep problems. The third group were people living near a busy road, and the fourth, the control, was of people living in a quiet rural area.
The study found that full spectrum noise from a turbine can disturb sleep, although less so than traffic noise, and the EEG picked up no effect at all from infrasound.
“We looked at everything that we could in terms of what that did to sleep, and that was in acute exposure while asleep… and we looked at that EEG response to those different exposures,” Catcheside says.
“If there are audible components, you get a response, so people tend to wake up… but with the infrasonic sound people did not respond at all.
“I would say that those two [studies] together, including our conference paper, that is enough good evidence to say that [infrasound] doesn’t do anything.”
Catcheside says the study does show one thing: that focusing on infrasound is distracting from a genuine issue: audible noise from wind turbines can disrupt sleep.
“The studies are important to reassure people that it is a noise like any other noise. It has a capability of disturbing sleep, particularly if your beliefs reinforce that, but there is no good strong evidence that the infrasonic element should be blamed,” he says.
“The infrasound is a distraction and that does more harm than good, if people then ignore the evidence.”
Sketchy anecdotes and tenuous claims
By 2022, the intensity of the fear about health issues appeared to be subsiding, the AEIC report said.
The drop off in health claims was confirmed by community engagement specialist Camilla Hamilton in a recent Solar Insiders episode. She hasn’t seen health issues raised in community meetings in the last few years, as data appeared to disprove them.
But that is changing.
In March, the anti-wind Facebook group No Wind Turbines – Scott River in Western Australia picked up on the paper by Swedish computer scientist Mattsson, which prefaced a computer model of how infrasound travels with a variety of health claims.
In the introduction, the Swedish paper claimed Woolcock’s randomised controlled trial was not to be trusted, because it didn’t use experts from two specific fields, didn’t include people who claimed to have wind turbine syndrome, didn’t use infrasonic pulses, and didn’t reflect long term exposure.
These details were accounted for in the Flinders study.
Instead, the Swedish authors, who are all engineers and computer scientists, ask readers to instead put their faith in papers and articles from the 2010s, and one from 1985, which posit tenuous, untested theories about how infrasound might interact with the human body.
It cited one human study which found small structural brain changes but no links to behavioural change.
To make it really clear where they stand on infrasound and health, the computer scientists and engineers even said in the introduction that two of their number attributed “sleep disorders and migraine headaches” to taking infrasound measurements at a wind farm, but with no other evidence than gut feel and proximity.
Mattsson pointed Renew Economy to a number of extra sources which he says shows “physiological research indicates that infrasound can interact with the auditory and vestibular systems even when not consciously perceived “.
And yet both of these, one by a German medical doctor called Stephan Kaula and the other by two Americans, were found in pay-to-publish journals and make a number of claims with little actual evidence to support them, and rely heavily on anecdotes.
In Australia, this kind of theorising masquerading as science is having a real, and negative, effect.
In New South Wales (NSW), the Sunny Corner District Conservation Association held a talk in Portland which included a session by Mariana Alves-Pereira.
Alves-Pereira is one half of a Portuguese duo who have tried for years to convince sceptical medical professionals that infrasound causes “vibroacoustic disease,” despite offering little to no evidence.
In NSW, her talk included a series of terrifying but unverified anecdotes, research from 1960s and 70s space programs in the US and Soviet Union, and heat map images of sound waves moving through a house.
The latter detail that infrasound can move through walls is one of the new points being used to scare people.
That fearmongering is finding fertile ground, as the Senate inquiry into climate mis- and disinformation found as messages around renewables are both actively undermined and damaged by bad actors or botched consultation.
In an email to Renew Economy, Catcheside sent through a four-pager of 47 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, and conference abstracts and presentations all on infrasound and sleep.
But that may not be enough this time to convince people who have already convinced themselves that wind turbines are the source of their pain.
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