How a Wind Turbine is likely to affect your property price

Written-by

Richard Burdett

Reviewed-by

Richard Burdett

Updated on

Sep 04, 2024

How a Wind Turbine is likely to affect your property price

Will Wind Turbines Affect My Property Value?

There’s no doubt that wind turbines are big enough to be noticed and if you’ve had one mounted on your roof top or decide to install one in the garden, then you probably want to know whether that is going to affect the property value if you choose to sell. Most people would say that a big construction such as a wind turbine would bring the price of a property down. They may be right but surprisingly little research, until recently, has been done into the side effects of wind turbines.

Properties Close to a Wind Farm

There have not been many studies about how your proximity to a wind farm or other major turbine construction is going to affect the price of your property. The London School of Economics (LSE) have undertaken the first major one and reported earlier this year that those within 1.2 miles of a large wind farm would have around 13% knocked off the value of their homes. For those living 2.5 miles away that goes down to 3%. There are currently around 4,564 land locked wind turbines and 1,075 offshore producing a total of over 27 million MW per year and powering more than 6 million homes. Find out more. Another report, however, says that the presence of wind turbines has no effect on property prices within a 5 km radius and may even, in some circumstances, improve values. The report by the Centre for Economic and Business Research also said that the notion that wind farms decrease property values are more often than not cited by those who object deeply to them as a renewable power source. Find out more. The debate will no doubt continue to rage about their aesthetic value and the impact wind turbines may or may not have on the price of individual houses. It’s an argument that is not just confined to the UK with other countries ferociously debating the issues and objectors to planning permission using a decrease in house prices as one of their leading arguments.

Properties That Install a Wind Turbine

There has been even less research done on the actual impact of having your own domestic wind turbine and how much it will impact on the price of a particular house. It’s also one of the reasons why building a wind turbine in an urban area is more likely than not to attract objections to planning permission. Factors that may affect the value of your house and those surrounding it include:

• How big and obtrusive the wind turbine is.
• The noise it produces.
• Whether it returns on the investment – in other words is the turbine ‘paying its way’?

The truth is that there are not many people installing wind turbines in a domestic situation where they don’t have enough clear land available. In suburban and urban areas there is not normally the space available to erect a free standing turbine and building mounted ones rarely deliver the amount of energy that makes them an effective investment (although that may change with better technology). For homes in a more secluded environment it is clear that the value of the property will be linked to the energy saving and profit making capabilities of any wind turbine, perhaps allied to how close it is to the property. It may also come down to the personal choice of any potential buyer.

The Future of Domestic Wind Turbines

After the initial excitement of being able to install wind turbines on a domestic property, things have dampened down with the efficiency and energy production not being quite what is needed, as well as concerns over property prices. There’s no doubt that to be truly viable there needs to a redesign of the wind turbine if it is to become a common site in urban areas. In the meantime, installing a wind turbine may well affect your property price and, more importantly, those surrounding you. The perceived reduction in house prices for those living within a couple of miles of an industrial wind farm might, in the future, be softened by a change in attitude as we start to become more attuned to renewable technologies. Find out more about the future of wind turbine technologies.