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How Falmouth Got Duped Wind Turbines

See here and below a 2004 Vestas Power Point Presentation by Vestas employee Erik Sloth which acknowledges the legitimacy of complaints over wind turbine noise and the systematic underestimation of noise impacts through failure to account for common variables affecting wind turbine noise emissions on site.

See also the essay below by Max Rheese concerning Vestas recent efforts to deny adverse impacts and the blatantly false assertions by Vestas and other wind energy supporters, including the Massachusetts Department of Environmental "Protection" under Commissioner Kenneth Kimmell that there is "no evidence of harm" from wind turbine noise.

Vestas and the Massachusetts Dept of Environmental "Protection" are fellow travelers, two peas in a pod, falsely proclaiming the "lack of scientific proof" of harm from wind turbine noise -- even though both of them certainly do know better.

Prior to his appointment as Commissioner of MADEP in 2011, Mr. Kimmell, co-authored the "Wind Energy Siting Reform Act"  as general counsel for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs for Governor Deval Patrick whose primary purpose was to consolidate control of permitting of wind energy facilities in Massachusetts under a permitting authority appointed by the Governor, depriving local communities of their traditional jurisdiction over development within their own borders.

As Commissioner of MADEP, Mr. Kimmell rushed out the infamous MADEP wind turbine noise "study," which was produced through a non-public process after a handful of meetings by a "panel" of individuals selected by MA DEP who all have previous ties to the wind energy industry.  

The study failed to review or consider evidence of harm from wind turbine noise that was submitted to it and blatantly misstated and mischaracterized the conclusions of several well-known studies of wind turbine noise that it did review, in the study findings, in the executive summary and in the MA DEP press releases which accompanied the publication of the report and which proclaimed I(falsely) that there is "no evidence of harm" from wind turbine noise.

The MADEP study, which is routinely cited by the American Wind Energy Associations, the wind energy trade association, and by other wind turbine proponents in permitting hearings has been exhaustively critiqued and widely discredited as "junk science" -- i.e. a political tool produced at the instigation of a political hack, rather than an objective scientific document.

Please also note that the MA DEP has declined to enforce existing noise regulations for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (according to an archaic 1972 standard that is woefully inadequate in protecting residents from the most harmful aspects of wind turbine noise) where noise from wind turbines has exceeded the statutory limit. 

In order to appreciate how an institution like the Massachusetts Department of Environmental "Protection" could have become so politicized and corrupt, one need only review the resume of Commissioner Kimmell.

Prior to joining the Patrick Administration and authoring a bill that attempted to engineer the development of wind energy in Massachusetts by brute force, Mr. Kimmell was an eponymous partner of the law firm Bernstein, Cushner & Kimmell (currently known as BCK Law), which serves as the general counsel to both the Cape Light Compact (CLC) and the Cape & Vineyard Electric Cooperative (CVEC).  The Cape Light Compact and the Cape & Vineyard Electric Cooperative are the largest clients of BCK Law.

When Mr. Kimmell joined the Patrick Administration in January 2007, BCK Law was in the process of assisting the Cape Light Compact to form CVEC "to do the things that the Cape Light Compact was legally prohibited from doing" -- principally, to install industrial wind turbines on the Cape & Vineyard. 

As residents of the Cape & Vineyard may recall, it was CVEC's publicly stated ambition upon its founding in 2007 to install "20 to 30" giant industrial wind turbines on Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard over a ten year period.

Note also that the Commissioner's chief deputy, Ms. Alicia (McDevitt) Barton has been rewarded for her work in overseeing the production of the official, pseudo-scientific MA DEP "Shameless Whitewash of the Harmful Impacts of Wind Turbine Noise" (as it is unofficially known) by being appointed to head up the Mass Clean Energy Center. 

As residents of Cape Cod well know, the Mass Clean Energy Center never saw a wind turbine project that it didn't love.  In recent years, representatives of the Mass Clean Energy Center offered ardent testimony in towns from one end of Cape Cod to the other in favor of installing 400 and 500 foot wind turbines in Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, Harwich, Brewster and Bourne -- to name a few -- promising that none these installations -- some of which were to be sited within 500 feet of residences -- would never harm a soul!

Residents of Cape Cod may recall that the Mass Clean Energy Center actually purchased two Vestas V-80 wind turbines to be installed in the town of Orleans -- before the Orleans water commission had actually approved the idea of installing them.

When the Orleans water commission denied approval of the project, the Mass Clean Energy Center tried desperately to foist them off onto one town after another in Massachusetts while it kept them in storage for years in a warehouse in Texas. 

Ultimately, the Mass CEC did find a sucker who was willing to buy the equipment at a hefty discount, after MA CEC agreed to prepay the sum of $1 million for 20 years of production of Renewable Energy Certificates from the wind turbines.  These two wind turbines -- rechristened Wind I and Wind II -- are now the prized possession of the Town of Falmouth, MA.

After the wind turbines began to cause dire problems for nearby residents -- as evidenced by extensive studies and as agreed by the Falmouth Zoning Board of Appeals (twice) and by a court of law (even as the Falmouth Board of Selectmen and Falmouth Board of Health stuck their heads in the sand), the Town approached the Mass CEC to appeal for forgiveness of some financial obligations to ease the burden of removing this health menace. 

In one of her first official actions as head of the Mass CEC, Ms. Barton -- Commissioner Kimmell's former deputy at the MA DEP who orchestrated the sham study on wind turbine noise that didn't discover any harm because it strenuously avoided looking for any -- sent Falmouth a message which can be paraphrased, as follows:

"Mass CEC to Falmouth: Drop Dead."

Actually, it was worse than that.

The Mass CEC -- under the direction of Ms. Barton, the former senior official of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental "Protection" and chief deputy of Commissioner Kimmell -- actually offered the Town of Falmouth a bribe to increase the hours of operation of the wind turbine! 

Yes, it's true.  Ms. Barton and the Mass CEC offered to forgive the debt that the Town of Falmouth owed to Mass CEC, but only if Falmouth agreed to run the wind turbines flat out!

Financial assistance, yes. 

Sympathy for the plight of residents in Falmouth who are being tortured on a daily basis by the operation of the wind turbines?  Absolutely not! 

Residents of Cape Cod may also recall that Ms. Barton's predecessor as head of the Mass Clean Energy Center -- who was instrumental in brokering the deal to get the wind turbines out of the warehouse in Texas where they were hurting no one and into the ground in Falmouth so that they could torture residents there and tear the community apart -- was Ms. Carter Wall.

Ms. Barton took over the reins at the Mass Clean Energy Center when Ms. Wall left government service to take a lucrative position in the private sector as the Director of the Performance Solar Division of a firm in Boston called Broadway Renewable Strategies, which is a subsidiary of the Broadway Electrical Company.

As residents of the Cape & Vineyard know, the Cape & Vineyard Electric Cooperative (CVEC) announced with great fanfare in 2012 that CVEC had hired Broadway Electric, through Broadway Renewable Strategies, to install approximately 66 MW of solar installations on the Cape & Islands at a projected total cost of $200 million.  

As noted above, CVEC and its parent organization, the Cape Light Compact, are the largest clients by far of Commissioner Kimmell's former law firm, BCK Law.

Regrettably, however, as Commonwealth Magazine and the Cape Cod Times reported last month, workers for Broadway Renewable Strategies suddenly walked off the job at all the CVEC photo voltaic installation work sites because Broadway Electrical is going out of business. 

After months of protracted delays, a change in banks, a change in equity investors and a unilateral demand for better contractual terms for the investor group, Broadway Renewable Strategies managed to meet the permitting deadlines for a grand total of 13 MW of the original 66 MW of PV projects proposed by CVEC and trumpeted in the CVEC press release.

Then Broadway went belly up, without warning, leaving all of the CVEC projects in limbo.

The good news is that BCK Law has made millions of dollars doing all of the legal work for CVEC -- and continues to generate huge fees in the current desperate attempt by CVEC to resolve the crisis precipitated by the "Performance Solar Division" under the direction of the former head of the Mass Clean Energy Center, the patron saint of the Falmouth wind turbines, Ms. Carter Wall.

To date, the Cape Light Compact has funneled over $3 million in CLC ratepayer funds to CVEC, the illegitimate shell corporation that CLC's attorneys, Bernstein, Cushner and Kimmell (a.k.a. BCK Law) helped CLC to form "to do things that CLC is legally prohibited from doing" -- such as building industrial wind turbines. 

All of the CVEC wind turbine proposals were repudiated by the local communities that were designated to host them (but not before the Mass Clean Energy Center invested at least $200,000 in these ill-fated projects).  

The vast majority of the proposed CVEC photovoltaic installations with the "Performance Solar Division" of Broadway Renewable Energy are dead and the remaining handful are in serious jeopardy since they must be permitted, completed, tested and operating no later than June 30, 2014 -- and since there is no one to install them.

But CLC and CVEC have bigger problems than the sudden demise of these CVEC projects, the most recent in a long series of failed endeavors. 

For just as some people are appalled by the specter of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental "Protection" scheming to enable developers to harm them; other citizens have taken issue with the efforts of Bernstein, Cushner & Kimmell to assist its client, the Cape Light Compact, in creating s shell company called CVEC for the express purpose of "doing things that CLC is legally prohibited from doing." 

A Special Committee of Inquiry of the Barnstable County legislature investigated the governance and finances of CLC and CVEC, including the relationship between CLC and CVEC, and raised many serious questions.  In its Report, the Special Committee highlighed a series of dubious transactions that occurred in the months preceding the formation of CVEC, when CLC was working with BCK Law to form the new shell company. 

The Special Committee issued a final report in May of 2012 that was highly critical of CLC's financial sponsorship of the shell company, CVEC; expressed concern about the lack of transparency and accountability of both organizations, including financial transparency and accountability; recommended a forensic financial audit; and recommended an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the Inspector General.

After further months of wrangling with CLC and CVEC, the Assembly of Delegates voted on December 4, 2013 to request assistance from the AG and the IG to conduct a thorough investigation these two public bodies, including their governance and their finances; the propriety of their financial relationship (with CLC operating CVEC as a de facto subsidiary); and the potential conflict of interest arising from BCK Law serving as general counsel to both entities.

From all appearances, it seems that the Attorney General and the Inspector General will respond, or are already responding to the request by the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates for a thorough investigation of CLC and CVEC.

Just as one cannot eliminate the harmful adverse impacts of wind turbine noise through artful propaganda and wishful thinking -- as Vestas and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental "Protection" have tried to do; so one cannot simply evade legal restrictions by running the illegal activity through a shell company that has been formed "to do the things that one is legally prohibited from doing," with 100% of the shell company's expenses paid by the parent entity that believes it is sufficient merely to pretend that it is all legal.


Eric Bibler


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Falmouth Massachusetts Has Three Vestas 1.65 Megawatt Turbines   https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2014/02/16/what-vestas-knew-and-when/     February 16, 2014 • Opinions  

Credit:  By Max Rheese - posted Monday, 17 February 2014, onlineopinion.com.au ~~

This is a story about the wind industry and turbine manufacturer, Vestas and the global campaign to counter dissent about the adverse impacts caused by their product to an often ignored minority of people living in rural communities worldwide.

Find out what's happening in Falmouthwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

It is also about the useful idiots co-opted to help sell its message. A term used for those who are seen to unwittingly support an objectionable cause which they naïvely believe to be a force for good.

For a decade individuals and community groups have been calling for studies into the adverse health impacts of wind turbine noise both in Australia and overseas.

Find out what's happening in Falmouthwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

This relatively recent phenomenon coincides remarkably with the growth in size of wind turbines from 50m in height to over 150m, taller than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Noise from these massively larger turbines has increased correspondingly with low-frequency noise broadcast over a much larger area according to Danish experts Professors Moeller and Pedersen who said “It must be anticipated that problems with low-frequency noise will increase with even larger turbines.”

The common refrain from wind energy companies and their supporters is that there is no evidence of adverse health impacts to nearby residents. To be factually correct they should have been saying there was no published evidence, which is why those affected want an independent properly constituted health study acceptable to all parties. Despite these claims by the wind industry as of late 2012 there were over a dozen peer-reviewed published papers linking wind turbine noise with health impacts.

Supporters point to 20 reviews, mainly of existing literature, held in various countries that have found no conclusive evidence linking turbine operations with poor health.

Literature reviews of previous studies serve a purpose as do the plethora of separate studies by acousticians, sleep experts and physicians, many of which draw the conclusion there is a strong prima facie case that low-frequency noise generated by wind turbines causes chronic sleep deprivation in some people which then degenerates to adverse health impacts.

Global wind turbine supplier, the Danish company Vestas, launched their Act on Facts campaign in Melbourne during 2013 to counter the “success” of community groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Australian Environment Foundation in convincing parliamentarians of the need for a study.

The Act on Facts campaign, as the name implies, is to quash ‘myths’ and counter ‘misinformation’ by those who have concerns about the uncritical acceptance of wind energy.

Therefore the recent discovery of a 2004 PowerPoint presentation by Vestas employee Erik Sloth to the former Australian Wind Energy Association (now the Clean Energy Council) demonstrating Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers are required to protect neighbours from noise, their pre-construction noise models are not accurate and that “we know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits” is a disturbing contradiction to their rhetoric and the ideals of their campaign. It is also confirmation the global wind industry have in fact been peddling misinformation rather than facts.

Issues referred to in the Vestas presentation were commented on in the previously mentioned peer-reviewed paper by Professors Moeller and Pedersen published six years after the Vestas presentation, where they stated “that minimum distances to dwellings are often calculated from noise data that lack an appropriate safety margin. Using data without a safety margin, such as mean values for a given turbine model, measurements from a single turbine, or ‘best guess’ for future turbines gives in principle a probability of 50 per cent that the actual erected turbines will emit more noise than assumed and that noise limits will be exceeded.”

This statement no doubt accounts for some of the known instances of wind farms exceeding noise guidelines as detailed in a Supreme Court case in South Australia. The level of angst in rural communities from disruption to their lives through intrusive noise and wind industry resistance to long-held community concerns has driven more than one expensive court proceedings.

The numerous instances of wind farm operators refusing to release noise data, not keeping accurate records of complaints and buying out some neighbours to silence them with gag clauses is well known and also indicative of an industry desperate to suppress damning information.

The Act on Facts campaign is acknowledgement by the wind industry that they have not been able to successfully control the dissemination of information that is detrimental to their very existence. Community support is vital for the wind industry as they cannot profitably survive in any country in which they operate without continued generous public subsidies.

This is what makes the Vestas Act on Facts campaign nothing more than corporate spin as outlined in The Guardian: ‘Ken McAlpine, public affairs director for Vestas in Australia, said the highly-unconventional corporate campaign was being launched here because anti-wind groups in Australia had been more successful than in any other country. He accused some of spreading misinformation and using “astroturfing” (fake grassroots) campaigns to persuade politicians to pass legislation making wind farm operations more difficult.’

Or maybe the more than 2000 community groups in 33 countries have been successful because they are the only ones telling the truth.

Does Vestas inside knowledge, since 2004, that their turbines will have an effect on some people and their subsequent denials of such constitute misinformation or something much worse? Certainly the culture at Vestas is called into question by Professor of Political Science, Peter Nedergaard from Copenhagen University who said “There’s no doubt that Vestas here smears its opponents.”

If one accepts at face value the claims of the wind industry, vociferously articulated over the last decade that there are no health impacts from wind turbine noise, it begs the question of why they are so secretive with regards to noise data. More importantly if they are so confident of their product, why not take the fight to their critics by vigorously encouraging government to undertake health studies to prove there are no adverse effects as they claim?

Surely it would be in the interests of the wind industry to fund independent studies to vindicate their claims and silence critics, especially since they say their turbines pose no threat to human health.

The hypocrisy of claiming moral purity while not taking available action that would exonerate them, while concealing information that damns their operations, exposes the duplicitous nature of the wind industry and some supporters.

These supporters, many of whom are on the fringes of the medical fraternity, have either knowingly or unknowingly endorsed the denials of the wind industry.

Despite the wind industry being well aware for years that their product has the potential to cause serious harm to human health they invited Professor Simon Chapman, the Climate and Health Alliance, and others to help Vestas launch their ‘fact-based’ campaign last year.

Professor of Public Health, sociologist Simon Chapman who lacks any medical or acoustic qualifications, has been vocal in the media denigrating those who call for medical research into the effects of wind turbines and spoke at the launch of the Act on Facts campaign.

How can Professor Chapman reconcile his ridicule of the reasons numerous people have been forced to abandon their homes because of continuing adverse health effects with the knowledge that the company initiating the campaign knew a decade ago there were problems?

Or how does Professor Chapman reconcile his statements at the senate inquiry into the impacts of wind farms where he was asked if he would be opposed to research into health impacts he said it “would be a wonderful idea” with his strident advocacy depicting those seeking such research as “scaremongering” activists.

Chapman in an SBS radio interview in January this year questions the need for any further research, despite thinking it is a wonderful idea, saying there have been a total of 20 reviews since 2003. Indeed there has; reviews of existing literature but no independent research.

In the same interview he says “the U.S. research was done on wind turbines that were much smaller than what’s used today” which renders that research completely irrelevant as per the conclusions of the Moeller Pedersen research. Chapman by his own statements displays no obvious comprehension of the acoustical properties of wind turbine operation, but pretends to understand the issue.

What is worse though, for someone who parades his ‘health’ credentials while behaving like a dilettante on actual noise issues, Chapman and other ‘health professionals’ display an amazing lack of compassion in their dismissive attitude to people who claim to be suffering debilitating effects from pervasive wind turbine noise. Considering there has been no government health study demonstrating adverse health impacts – or studies showing there are not – one could be forgiven for thinking health professionals, of all people, would take a precautionary approach as recommended by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Indeed much the same could be said for the convenor of the Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA), Fiona Armstrong who also spoke at the campaign launch. What due diligence did the CAHA undertake before deciding there was no substance to the concerns of thousands of people around the world who are directly impacted by wind turbines? As someone representing health professionals did Fiona Armstrong call for independent health studies to settle the noise issue once and for all? Having endorsed the Vestas campaign to stick to the facts, what is the response of the CAHA to the internal Vestas document acknowledging noise from their turbines impacts some people in rural communities?

President of the CAHA is Dr Liz Hanna. It is assumed that Dr Hanna authorised the participation of CAHA at the Vestas launch of its corporate spin campaign. This immediately puts both Dr Hanna and the CAHA in a position of assisting a turbine manufacturer to deny the adverse health impacts from its product – impacts which it is well aware of and were acknowledged in the 2004 presentation.

There is no evidence any of these health professionals have taken the trouble to interview Annie Gardner, Donald Thomas, Trish Godfrey, Noel Dean, Brian Kermonde, Carl or Samantha Stepnell or dozens of others in Victoria alone to determine the integrity of their claims relating to the effects they have been subjected to from wind turbines.

Perhaps the health professionals knew they would be confronted with inconvenient truths if they did, which would undermine their confected outrage at the temerity of those who do not genuflect before the turbines of righteousness.

Another speaker at the campaign launch was Simon Holmes à Court, chairman of Hepburn Wind. Holmes à Court is famous for being the driving force behind the two turbine community owned wind farm near Daylesford Victoria, the first of its kind in Australia. Holmes à Court has assiduously cultivated the media in numerous feature articles to present as the community minded crusader for wind energy. He is perhaps infamous for Hepburn Wind repeatedly reneging on a commitment to release noise data from the Daylesford wind farm after a number of nearby residents, including a local doctor started suffering health impacts.

Uncritical public acceptance of wind industry spin began to change after the 2011 senate inquiry into the impacts of wind farms, chaired by Greens senator Rachel Siewert made the unequivocal recommendation that “the Commonwealth Government initiate as a matter of priority thorough, adequately resourced epidemiological and laboratory studies of possible effects of wind farms on human health.”

After a decade of grass-roots rural community angst from being ridden over roughshod by multi-national energy companies aided by state and federal governments eager to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about climate change, while ignoring the basic human right to enjoy rest and repose in their own home, the issue of health impacts will now get the hearing it deserves.

The Abbott government has announced a health study into the effects of wind farms with the Victorian government pledging $100,000 support.

Environment groups that have supported the wind industry and taken their thirty pieces of silver, ‘health professionals’ who have no expertise in acoustics and no interest in faraway rural communities, but do have an overblown interest in climate health effects, have jumped on the wind energy bandwagon eager to claim the high moral ground despite the human collateral damage. They instead should have taken the time to look at the noise data and the evidence. It also would not have hurt to at least speak with the affected families as well.

By allowing themselves to be co-opted as useful idiots to support a so-called ‘noble cause’, where the ends justify the means as well as failing to exhibit a modicum of caution or undertake due diligence, they now find themselves endorsing an industry denying in public what it knows in private to be true. Good luck with that!

Source:  By Max Rheese - posted Monday, 17 February 2014, onlineopinion.com.au
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