Sound at Scale: Characterizing Impacts of Noise Ordinances on the Onshore Wind Energy Technical Potential for the United States

Recent surveys have documented the rapid rise of sound ordinances across state and county jurisdictions, which has become crucial for wind energy siting. However, the lack of information on ordinances and computational challenges in turbine sound modeling create uncertainties regarding how evolving policies may affect resource potential and clean energy objectives. Therefore, we develop an approach to evaluate wind turbine sound profiles at millions of locations across the U.S. and translate them into setback distances for every residential structure. Compared to a baseline reference scenario, we find a 7% reduction in the national wind energy capacity potential when accounting for counties with existing sound ordinances. Additionally, when expanding the surveyed sound ordinances nationwide, we observe a potential loss of 53% of the national wind capacity under the most stringent ordinances, with a disproportionate share of this lost capacity coming from high-quality and low-cost wind resource. This work reveals that neglecting sound ordinances results in a significant overestimation of wind resource potential and highlights the important trade-offs between increased wind energy deployment to meet target decarbonization goals and the social/environmental impacts of this deployment that must be considered.