Low noise level is an essential feature when installing ventilation systems today. To achieve attenuation over a broad frequency range, the passive silencers traditionally used to attenuate ventilation noise can be combined with an active noise control (ANC) system. To insure reliable operation and desirable levels of attenuation when applying ANC to duct noise, it is highly important to be able to suppress the contamination of the microphone signals due to the turbulent pressure fluctuations arising as the microphones are exposed to the airflow in the duct. This paper is the first in a series of two, that treats the problem of turbulence induced noise originating from the airflow inside the ducts. Part I is concerned with theoretical and experimental investigations of the influence of the turbulence induced noise on the adaptive algorithm in the ANC system. Part II is concerned with design and investigations of microphone installations for turbulence suppression and results concerning the performance of an ANC system with the different microphone installations are presented. Some of the results were obtained at an acoustic laboratory according to an ISO-standard. The attenuation achieved with ANC was approximately 15-25 dB between 50-315 Hz even for airflow speeds up to 20 m/s.