A problem with wind energy

Contemporary wind turbines create inaudible pressure spikes that impact the body's internal "gyroscope;" for some people, effects are intolerable.

I am a lawyer (keep reading anyway) with a long history in energy law. I recently finished an intriguing case involving wind turbines. I am creating this – my first Substack Post – to share what I learned, because I was surprised. You may be too.

Here’s the TL;DR: when operating exactly as designed and planned, modern, industrial-scale wind power plants will lead to people vacating their homes, and some of them are likely driven out by impacts to their balance system that occur because of how modern wind turbines (ever larger and more powerful, with slow-moving blades) operate.

Vacated homes linked to wind turbine nuisances are a worldwide phenomenon. Some examples:

• Waubra Wind Farm (Victoria, Australia): Eleven homes within ~1.5 km were vacated, citing turbines as the cause..
  

• Cape Bridgewater Wind Farm (Victoria, Australia): Homes were vacated based on reports of ringing ears, heart racing, and vibration.
  

• Fontrieu / Margnès (Tarn, France): A lawsuit was brought by displaced homeowners, citing headaches, insomnia, dizziness, tinnitus, nausea and heart irregularities. Homeowners won. The Court recognized wind turbines as the cause of their symptoms.

• “[A]bandoned homes study” (Ontario, Canada):Multiple, peer-reviewed published articles reviewed the reasons people gave for vacating their homes near industrial wind facilities.

• Shirley Wind. Vacated homes were linked to very low frequency pressure pulses. The Board of Health for Brown County – the location of the wind farm – designated the wind farm a “human health hazard.” The Board has not repudiated the designation.

• Red Barn Wind Farm. Multiple complaints and at least one home vacated long term based on “nauseogenic” complaints.

Unless they are directly displaced for land to build the facility, homeowners are rarely driven to vacate their homes when nearby energy production equipment operates exactly as designed. But with modern wind turbines, it happens regularly.

Spiked Pressure Pulses

Many people who vacate homes near industrial wind facilities cite obvious nuisances such as audible noise and shadow flicker from turbine blades casting repeated transient shadows.

Others, including the women identified in the last two bullet points above – leave their homes indicating that they experience nausea and vertigo when turbines are operating, even when they can neither see the turbines nor hear their audible noise.

Research has linked such symptoms to a phenomenon that audiologist Jerry Punch, PhD, a Michigan State University Professor Emeritus, has labeled “spiked pressure pulses” or “SPPs.” SPPs are the high-amplitude spikes in air pressure that occur when rotating turbine blades pass the wind turbine tower. These high-amplitude pressure changes can be readily detected and graphically displayed as transient spikes that stand out prominently against the overall acoustic energy produced by wind turbines.

Though SPPs are co-created along with higher-frequency pressure changes that create audible sounds – the “whoosh” you hear if you are close enough to hear rotating blades passing the turbine tower – they are not the same. You can’t hear SPPs.

Like all sound, SPPs are acoustic energy – mechanical air pressure waves that travel through the air – but we cannot hear SPPs because they occur outside the sound wave frequencies that people can hear. Like a dog whistle – but at the opposite end of the frequency spectrum. (1)

The sounds from wind turbines that occur at audible frequencies can be analogized to ripples on water. These audible sound waves scatter, lose energy quickly (2), and are easily disrupted, broken up or blocked by obstacles. As they weaken, they become indistinguishable from the many other sounds that occur in the same frequency range.

By way of contrast, SPPs are like large swells in water; they lose little energy to obstacles, and they continue for a long distance. Though not recognized as audible sound, SPPs impact the motion-detection sensors in our inner ears. Motion detection is critical to your sense of balance and movement. Your motion- detection equipment conveys to your brain whether you are in motion (or not) and whether you are balanced (or not).

The balance system

Although we may consider our ears to be only hearing organs, they have another critical job: helping us maintain balance. Tiny fluid-filled sacs in the inner ear act like exquisitely sensitive motion sensors. Your brain combines information from these motion sensors with information from position sensors in muscles, joints, tendons and skin (3), as well as information from your eyes. You can literally watch a baby developing its balance system in real time as it learns to move, sit up without falling over, crawl, stand, walk, and climb, etc.

As you build and train your balance system, the patterns it encounters evolve into automatic predictions - - so your balance system is aware that the signals from each of the three main input mechanisms should be aligned. When the motion sensors in your ears sense motion, your eyes will see motion and the position sensing system in other parts of your body will align with the visual and motion-sensor signals.

When signals do not match up as expected, your brain alerts you that “something is wrong” because there is a sensory conflict. Your body reacts with physiological symptoms like dizziness, vertigo, motion sickness, disorientation, nausea, and unease.

Here is an example from my life; my guess is many people may have had similar experiences.

Our small office building is on a corner at the base of an incline. On weekends, I often park out front on the street, facing downhill. Other people park on the same side of the street behind me because I often manage to get the last legal parking space before the corner. I was in the car one Saturday, strapped in and ready to go home, getting ready to put the car in gear with my foot on the brake. I went to make one last check of my rear-view mirror. When I looked my eyes told me I was already pulling away from the car behind me.

But my foot was on the brake. The car was not in gear. My body awareness and the motion sensor system in my ears told me I was standing still. At that moment I felt all the symptoms: dizziness, disorientation, nausea and unease, as well as a quickly rising emotional panic over what was happening. What’s the deal with the car? Was I uncontrollably rolling down the incline into the intersection ahead of me?

My internal motion sensor and my body awareness system turned out to be right: I was not moving.

But I perceived that I must be moving because my glance in the rear-view mirror showed me that my car and the car parked behind were moving apart. It turns out the car behind me was backing up. But since I expected that the car behind me was parked and stationary – an expectation based on decades of driving away from parked cars – my eye-brain system told me that my car was moving while my motion-sensor and body awareness system told me I was stationary. The mismatch, or conflict, triggered the symptoms.

Bad Vibrations

SPPs, like all sound (whether you can hear it or not), come from, and with, vibration or oscillation. (4) They can cause motion sickness by introducing vibration to the body’s motion sensor, putting it out-of-sync with the other parts of the balance system. Some people are far more sensitive than others.

When the motion sensors in vulnerable peoples’ ears feel the impact of SPPs, “parts of the brain other than the primary auditory cortex become active and the signals are perceived as something other than sound.”(5). Because SPPs vibrate at a frequency perceived by the motion-sensor (“vestibular”) component of the balance system, SPPs trigger a response that corresponds to the response triggered by other comparably low-frequency vibrations. Science fully accepts that “oscillatory motion” affecting the body’s motion-sensor (the “vestibular system”) causes “motion sickness.” (ISO 9996: 1996, pp. iii [Introduction], 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8 [see endnote 6]).

As with motion sickness on boats or airplanes, not everyone gets sick. People vary in how the inputs to their balance system interact. People have different thresholds of amplitude at which they experience symptoms. “[A]bout 5% to 10% of the population is extremely sensitive to motion sickness; 5% to 15% are relatively insensitive; and about 75% are only subject to it to a ‘normal,’ i.e., limited degree.”(7).

Women are at greater risk for the same reasons that they are more susceptible to motion sickness.(8). The final two items in the bullet list at the beginning of this post involve homes vacated because women trying to live in them were debilitated by SPPs.

The Shirley Wind Study.

The influence of SPPs has been recognized for about 15 years. People began reporting “motion sickness” type symptoms when wind turbines, in the first decade of this century, became large enough to generate pressure pulses at less than 1 Hz (longer blades on taller towers rotate more slowly).

People vacating their homes near the Shirley Wind project in Northeast Wisconsin, not far from Green Bay, led the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin to commission a study (9) by four consulting firms. Two of the four firms had income streams from assisting wind development projects. One had worked almost exclusively with wind project opponents. One had worked about equally with proponents and opponents. None of the experts involved in the study was categorically opposed to wind projects.

The consensus of all four firms (10) was that that the issue of very low-frequency infrasound (the pulses later designated “SPPs” by Dr. Punch) needed urgent attention:

The four investigating firms are of the opinion that enough evidence and hypotheses have been given herein to classify LFN (11) and infrasound as a serious issue, possibly affecting the future of the industry. It should be addressed beyond the present practice of showing that wind turbine levels are magnitudes below the threshold of hearing at low frequencies.

(See: 2012 A Cooperative Measurement Survey and Analysis of Low Frequency and Infrasound at the Shirley Wind Farm in Brown County, Wisconsin PDF: p. 18; internal pagination, p. 7.)

One of the researchers explained further in an appendix:

Nausea was experienced and nauseogenicity is indicated. (See: id.: PDF p. 14; internal pagination of Appendix C, p. 3.)

A nauseogenic factor is present. Naval, aviation and other research has established human sensitivity to motion producing nausea. While mechanism for motion sickness is not well understood, “theories all describe the cause of motion sickness via the same proposition: that the vestibular apparatus within the inner ear provides the brain with information about self motion that does not match the sensations of motion generated by visual or kinesthetic (proprioceptive) systems, or what is expected from previous experience”. The range of motion nauseogenicity has been measured at 0.1 to 0.7 Hz and with a maximum nauseogenic potential at 0.2 Hz [5][6] (see Figure 1).

(See: id., PDF: p. 17; internal pagination of Appendix C, p. 6; bolding and italics in original.)

The correlations to nauseogenicity at the 2.5MW power rating and size suggest worsening effects as larger, slower-rotating wind turbines are sited near people.

(See: id., PDF: p. 19; internal pagination of Appendix C, p. 8.) The four firms jointly recommended “additional study on an urgent priority basis.” (See: id. PDF: p. 8; internal pagination, p. 7.)

Regulatory and Industry Reaction

Reacting to health impacts that primarily affect women, the wind industry has responded with what I would characterize as “gaslighting.” Commissions notionally charged with regulating the industry (I will write later about the “revolving door” between “regulators” and the electrical industry)have limited their regulations to audible noise.

The industry argues that people experiencing powerful and debilitating physical effects that arise only when wind turbines – that they can neither see nor hear – are suffering from a “nocebo” effect, i.e., they are consciously or subconsciously generating their symptoms based on expectations derived from things they have read or heard about and that are emotionally fueled by their desire to not have the wind turbines around. The explanation presumes people vacate their homes, take on multiple mortgages to get another place to live, or move from comfortable homes into campers because they prefer battling multi-billion-dollar wind turbine companies over their usual life activities.

The “nocebo” explanation fails. Here’s why:

First, across the world people suffer the same symptoms with no foreknowledge that others have experienced the same effects.

Second, people who are sensitive to SPPs experience symptoms that correspond to wind turbine operation when they have no visual or audible exposure to wind turbines, and no knowledge – other than through their symptoms – that turbines may be operating.

Third, Dr. Punch’s analysis aligns with known mechanisms of causation: i) consensus science, embodied in international standards, recognizes that vibrations at less than 1 Hz trigger perceptions of movement in the body’s motion-sensor; ii) a foundational scientific insight into the human balance system recognizes that a disconnect between what is perceived by the motion-sensing system and the other components of the balance system can cause motion sickness symptoms; iii) contemporary wind turbines produce pulses in the < 1 Hz “nauseogenic” range; iv) SPPS have been (and are being) measured in vacated homes; and v) people sensitive to the pulses have both reported, and been observed to experience, debilitating motion sickness when exposed - - even when they can neither see nor hear the wind turbines.

Fourth, the industry and their allies among regulators and wind energy advocates seem to be going to great lengths to evade, instead of address, the issue.

• The operator of the Shirley Wind farm agreed to suspend operation so that the Shirley Wind report authors could run a controlled experiment to determine whether “blinded” persons would suffer symptoms that they could link to wind turbine operations that the “subjects” of the experiment could neither see nor hear. This provided the industry a golden opportunity to prove that the symptoms were nothing more than the “nocebo” effect. The operators of Shirley Wind backed out of the arrangement.
  

• The unanimous recommendation of the Shirley Wind researchers, who jointly called for additional controlled independent research to confirm or falsify the link between very low-frequency pulses and adverse health effects, was ignored.
  
  The regulators instead, shortly thereafter, adopted regulatory standards that address only audible sound, entirely ignoring the body’s motion-detecting (vestibular) system, motion sickness, and the issue of sensory conflict.

Fifth, as much as people dislike having energy infrastructure nearby, no other method of generating electricity is documented to lead to people regularly deciding, often at great cost, to take extreme measures, such as vacating their homes, to escape the effects of an electricity generation facility when it is operating exactly as designed. Neither solar, nuclear, coal, hydro, nor natural gas have wind energy’s record of driving people from their homes.

The evidence from recorded data, international standards, scientific knowledge of how very low Hz pulses affect the balance system, the records of people vacating their homes, and industry evasion, all point to a real issue that is not going away, and that is likely to become more prominent with construction of larger wind turbines with slow turning blades that produce SPPs.

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Sources and Notes

1. Dog whistles create sound at frequencies greater than 20,000 Hz while SPPs occur at frequencies of 1 Hz or lower. Dogs hear dog whistles the same way we hear regular sound because their “filter” for audibility is different. Conversely, some sounds that we can hear, dogs cannot. If dogs were able to assign labels to those sounds, they might call them “human whistles.”

2. “LFN” refers to “Low Frequency Noise.” The term “Spiked Pressure Pulses” was developed by Dr. Punch to reference the specific low frequency range of concern.

3. The body awareness system (proprioception) is what enables you to touch your nose with your eyes closed.

4. These are essentially the same thing. For example, the oscillatory or vibrational (back and forth) motion produced by plucking a guitar string – making it vibrate – creates a tonal vibration or oscillation in the air. Scientists tend to use the terms in different contexts.

5. Direct Testimony of Dr. Jerry Punch, PhD, Dated 7/10/2025, p. 7.

6. “ISO” “ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies).” The ISO “develops and publishes international standards in technical and nontechnical fields, including everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, transport, IT, agriculture, and healthcare.” Wikipedia.

7. A theory to explain some physiological effects of the infrasonic emissions at some wind farm sites, Shomer, et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2015 Mar;137(3):1356-65, citing Montavit (2014). “Motion sickness,” for which the link is no longer live.

8. Bos JE, Damala D, Lewis C, Ganguly A, Turan O. Susceptibility to seasickness. Ergonomics. 2007 Jun;50(6):890-901. doi: 10.1080/00140130701245512. PMID: 17457748; Koslucher F, Haaland E, Malsch A, Webeler J, Stoffregen TA. Sex Differences in the Incidence of Motion Sickness Induced by Linear Visual Oscillation. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2015 Sep;86(9):787-93. doi: 10.3357/AMHP.4243.2015. PMID: 26388085; Park AH, Hu S. Gender differences in motion sickness history and susceptibility to optokinetic rotation-induced motion sickness. Aviat Space Environ Med. 1999 Nov;70(11):1077-80. PMID: 10608604.

9. Report Number 122412-1 Issued: December 24, 2012 A Cooperative Measurement Survey and Analysis of Low Frequency and Infrasound at the Shirley Wind Farm in Brown County, Wisconsin.

10. “This team functioned very well together with a common goal, and found collectively a new understanding of significant very low frequency wind turbine acoustic components that correlated with operating conditions associated with an intolerable condition for neighbors.”

11. “LFN” refers to “Low Frequency Noise.” The term “Spiked Pressure Pulses” was developed by Dr. Punch to reference the specific low frequency range of concern.