The Wabash County Board of Commissioners on Monday approved amendments to a six-year-old County ordinance regarding wind farms.
Wabash County Plan Commission Director Mike Howard came before the three-member board on Monday morning with an ordinance that, if approved, would delete and replace portions of County General Ordinance 85-2, 2010, “an ordinance regulating wind energy conservation systems in Wabash County, Indiana.”
One of the amendments is under the 2010 ordinance’s “Noise and Vibration” section.
“In 2012, I think it was, we amended it to increase the setback distance from a residence that a commercial wind farm could be from a residence,” Howard told the Plain Dealer. “We’re just decreasing that (permissible) noise level that we permit outside of a residence from a wind turbine from 45 decibels to 32 decibels.”
The decrease is applicable to non-commercial and commercial Wind Energy Conservation Systems (WECS), defined by the County as “all necessary devices that together convert wind energy into electricity and the electricity is independently consumed or delivered to a utility’s transmission lines...”
The exact amendment language is, “At no point outside of any Primary Structure shall the sound pressure levels from a wind turbine of any of the components that make up a NON-COMMERCIAL or COMMERCIAL WECS exceed 32 decibels on the ‘A’ weighted scale.”
A “Primary Structure” is defined as one “that one or more persons occupy, the majority of the time, on that property for either business or personal reasons.” Currently, County setback requirements for the systems are a minimum of 800 feet from any non-applicant Primary Structure.
According to Purdue University, 40 decibels is equivalent to bird calls or a library (44 db), while 50 decibels is equal to a quiet suburb, a conversation at home or a large electrical transformer at 100 feet. Thirty decibels is equivalent to a “quiet rural area.”
“The wind farms,” Howard said, “the units are bigger now so they can almost literally meet some of our setback requirements and the general consensus between the Commissioners and the Plan Commission Board is that we prefer not to have a large wind farm landscaping Wabash County.
“We decreased that decibel level to really make it almost impossible to be in there…We’re really tightening up the restrictions on that.”
Howard added that there are a few small wind turbines in Wabash County, but they’re nowhere near the larger turbines that are located south of Wabash County.
Monday’s ordinance also has a second amendment that addresses a phenomenon called “shadow flicker,” which is the flickering of sunlight on an area that’s caused by the rotation of the turbine’s fan blades.
The amendment states that “landscaping or fixtures shall be designed and installed, to the satisfaction of the infringed property owner, at the WECS Project owner’s expense to counter the effects of shadow flicker on any neighboring residential or business structure in which shadow flicker creates more than 15 minutes of nuisance in a 24-hour period, five or more days in a calendar year.”
The previously approved shadow flickering section of the 2010 ordinance didn’t establish any time parameters, nor did it establish that the changes would be paid at the expense of the WECS’ owner.