December 14, 2009
Mr. Ben Hoen
Ernest Orlando Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory
Re: The Impact of Wind Power Projects on Residential Property
Values in the United States: A Multi-Site Hedonic Analysis
Dear Mr. Hoen:
I have prepared this follow up Certified Review letter after reading your group’s published study (Report). Perhaps the LBNL research team will be doing supplemental or ongoing work that will incorporate corrections, additions and shift the focus to reflect proportionate relevance, and these review comments and concerns can be given due
consideration.
With all due respect, the final Report falls short of being a truly objective and reliable real estate value study of the issue at hand, in my professional opinion, the reasons for which I will begin to describe in this follow up review.
Intended Users of Report
As I predicted in a prior communication with you, your final Report would get a lot of exposure and probably be cited as justification for zoning and land use application approval requests for wind energy projects, on a far reaching scale.
For that reason, an abundance of caution should have been utilized to emphasize any reasonable and logical interpretation of the “nearby property” study data, even when that is contrary to, or significantly differs from, the thrust of the general conclusion that is based on the 5-mile and beyond data.
In this day and age of questionable “science” being applied regarding predictions of global warming, any appearance of omitting relevant data or painting “targets around bullet holes” does little to solve controversies or facilitate sound, well informed planning and decision making. With that preface, my review comments are, as follows:
