This is a microcosm of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality that pervades attempts to use reneweable energy to reduce pollution across the globe. It is not known whether the Justice has investments in fossil fuels, but he sure as heck doesn’t have any in wind power.
And just how many people have died from shadow flicker as compared to asthmatics having a bad time because of carbon air pollution?
But let’s not antagonise. We want to win over the sceptics, not flicker them to death. “Shadow flicker drives people mad, even if they keep their curtains shut or their blinds down,” said Angela Kelly, head of a British anti-wind-turbine pressure group called Country Guardian. Of course this only occurs when the sun is visible and low in the sky and the house is in direct path of the sun and the turbine. It’s no matter that the sun rarely shines more than 20% of days in the UK, and that the amount of time before the sun moves to a different position is ten minutes maximum, and the number of houses affected are less than 1% of all housing stock.
However in order to appease the wind grumble lobby, a possible solution is available. Vestas Wind Systems, has developed a predictive system that works out when shadow flicker is about to happen and stops the turbine rotating until the sun moves the shadows onto uninhabited land. It’s called the Vestas Shadow Detection System. The technology is based on software that computes four risk factors: the angle and position of the sun, the distance of the wind turbine to any potentially affected properties, the radius of the rotor blades and the height of the turbine hub from the ground. Once the risk of shadow flicker has been calculated, the software decides whether the turbine should be temporarily shut down until the sun passes and the shadow flicker moves on from homes.