Wind farms vs. neighbors - Solar, Wind and Land: Conflicts in Renewable Energy Development - page 30

wind farms and must be considered during the development and approval
process.
Flicker effects occur when direct sunlight is blocked by the blades of a
rotating turbine, creating shadows that move as the turbine blades move. As
sunlight flashes repeatedly between the revolving blades, a pulsing light-to-
dark-to-light effect results. Whenever the sunlight passing through windows
is a room's primary light source, this flicker effect can create the appearance
of lights recurrently being turned on and of.
Because most commercial turbines are sited a significant distance from
buildings, flicker effects tend to cause disturbances primarily when the sun
is low in the sky. A low sun most commonly occurs at sunrise and sunset
and is more frequent during winter months and in regions located far from
the equator. 64 Clouds and overcast conditions can prevent or substantially
mitigate flicker effects, but on clear days these effects can seriously disrupt
neighbors' quiet enjoyment of their land.
Aside from causing general annoyance, wind turbine flicker effects can
theoretically create serious medical risks for the small percentage of the
global population that suffers from photosensitive epilepsy. 65 Those with
this condition can suffer epileptic seizures when exposed to flickering
sunlight or other rapid flashes of light. Fortunately, most researchers have
concluded that the utility-scale wind turbines installed on wind farms today
are so large that their blades do not ordinarily rotate at rates fast enough
to trigger epileptic seizures . 66 Despite the existence of tens of thousands of
wind turbines across the planet, as of mid-2012 there had not been any
widely reported instances of seizures triggered by turbine shadow flicker.67 67
In cases where a nearby wind farm's flicker effects are already substan-
tially disrupting a landowner's enjoyment of land, some landowners are
likely to seek a legal remedy. In the United States, such situations raise an
interesting legal question because the U.S. common law has long held that
landowners are not liable for damages caused by their casting of shadows
onto a neighbor's land. In the famous U.S. case of Fountainebleau Hotel
Corp. v. Forty-Five Twenty-Five, Inc. , the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach,
Florida, sued a neighboring hotel owner to enjoin its construction of a
14-storey addition that would cast a large shadow on the Eden Roc Hotel's
beachfront property. The court refused to recognize a nuisance claim
based on the new shading, declaring that the Eden Roc had no legal right
to the free flow of light from adjoining land . 68 Based on this longstanding
precedent, landowners in the U.S. may have difficulty succeeding on
common law nuisance claims based on flicker effects, which are essentially
disruptions of the free flow of sunlight onto land . 69
On the other hand, the shadows at issue in flicker disputes and the nature
of the alleged resulting nuisance are fundamentally different than those
in Fountainebleau . The wind turbine shadows that cause flicker effects
are constantly moving and can create an annoying distraction in and of
themselves, which is arguably more worthy of recognition as a nuisance