How Wind Turbines Affect Communities: Evidence on Health, Productivity, and Residential Sorting

Wind turbines play an important role in the green transition towards a pollutionfree generation of electricity. Yet, the deployment of new wind turbines faces increasing local and political opposition. The public discourse routinely goes beyond wind turbines’ established negative impact on house prices. However, evidence on how residents react to new turbines and whether human health and labor market outcomes are affected remains limited. We study how industrial-scale onshore wind turbines affect nearby communities in Denmark, combining geo-coded information on all wind turbines installed after 1995 with 25 years of administrative full-population data. Exploiting the staggered timing of wind turbine establishments in an event-study framework allowing for heterogeneous treatment effects, we estimate the impact on neighborhood composition at the address level, and on mental health and labor market outcomes at the individual level. We find small negative effects on the occupancy of houses nearby large turbines, indicating a decrease in attractiveness. However, we detect no meaningful impacts on mental health, productivity, or the socio-economic composition of neighborhoods. Overall, our evidence does not indicate large adverse health effects from proximity of wind turbines, but it is consistent with local disamenities.