The multiple understandings of wind turbine noise: Reviewing scientific attempts at handling uncertainty

Abstract. The noise from wind turbines has been an issue in the planning and development of wind power for many years, giving rise to both controversies during the deployment of onshore wind farms as well as a significant amount of research by various communities of scientists, or what we treat here as epistemic communities. Despite iterative attempts at fixing the noise issue through investments into technological developments and regulatory determination of allowable decibel noise levels, noise remains a contested and difficult object to find solutions to. In the Co-Green project, we instigated a social science-based study founded in Science Technology Studies (STS) to look at why and how it is that noise continues to be so controversial. We do this through a narrative literature review of three different epistemic communities – the technical, health-based, and social acceptance literatures – tracing the emergence of the knowledge object of wind turbine noise. We illustrate how noise remains an ‘unruly knowledge object’ that defies stabilisation within and between the three epistemic communities: Instead, noise is understood as fundamentally different things across the three communities, fuelling the controversies over the solutions proposed, where the “fixes” might sometimes not address what was intended. We end by pointing to the potential benefits of more interdisciplinary engagement between epistemic communities and as well as to – in the context of science for policy – probe the potential value of finding ways to translate qualitative research findings into noise (and other) regulations.