Påverkan av skuggor från vindkraftverk

Sammanfattning: To get rid of our dependence on fossil fuels we need to make use of renewable energy sources like wind power to a greater extent. Even though wind power is a renewable energy source it can still cause some problems for the close environment. One of the problems is shadow flickering. When the sun is low and the wind blows in a direction so that the rotor blades are positioned at right angles to the sunbeams and ‘cut’ the sunbeams off. The beholder will see this as a flashing light, comparable to driving a car or going by train through an alley of trees. This shadow flickering experienced is aggravating for people living in the close surroundings of windmills. The research that has been done about how these shadows affect the people living close is insufficient. We hope that the result from this project can be used as a base for better judging on how people in the vicinity of windmills get affected by the shadows they are exposed to. Hopefully, this will simplify and speed up the application process for establishing new wind power plants. To calculate how many hours of shadow exposure the people in the close environment to the mills get, the windmill planning program WindPro 2.6 from EMD international A/S was used. The results were then compared to self reported disturbances by shadows collected in former epidemiological studies and have been presented mainly in diagrams. The study shows that there is a connection between shadow exposure and experienced disturbance. The disturbance seems to rely as much on the number of shadow hours as on the number of shadow occasions, most likely because these are usually closely related.