WREN testifies on HB 1188 for local control

On January 20, 2025 WREN President Sue Lani Madsen, testified via Zoom at the Washington House Environment & Energy Committee hearing on HB 1188. A link to the TVW recording is available here: https://tvw.org/video/house-environment-energy-2025011397/?eventID=2025011397 beginning at the 40:22 mark.

Live testimony was limited to 1 minute per person, and Madsen read a 1 minute excerpt from the following written testimony submitted to the committee:

The goal of the WREN (www.wrensong.org) is to amplify rural concerns early in policy discussions to mitigate unintended consequences of state decisions on rural communities. HB 1188 rightfully returns the final say on siting of industrial facilities to local control. I thank Rep. Dye for her summary of the range of concerns raised by her constituents. No one is clamoring to build wind turbines taller than the Space Needle in Bellevue. These are projects with significant physical, social and economic impacts in rural counties, not all positive.

There are many tradeoffs, I’ll focus today on human health. Low density populations are difficult to study because of small sample sizes, but a Swiss meta-study reviewing many studies on the impacts on human health of wind turbine sound, across frequencies, found one clear correlation with negative health impacts.

From the study commissioned by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, published in 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health:

“The relevance of factors such as participation in the planning process, procedural justice, feelings of fairness and balance of costs and benefits from wind turbines is strongly supported by current evidence. In summary: the health complaints are primarily associated with a range of contextual and personal factors rather than actual sound exposure levels.”

In conclusion: Negative health impacts are reduced if the tradeoff in costs and benefits are resolved locally. Or in other words, if they’re your cows, the manure smells like money. Please pass HB 1188 and return the final say on industrial wind and solar permitting to the counties to support healthy rural communities and to avoid litigation like that which is underway on the Horse Heaven Hills project.

The NIH National Library of Medicine link to the study is here and a highlighted pdf has been uploaded.  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8430592/