States like Nebraska and Wyoming without RPSs still have an immense amount of wind available, so the economics of wind power still make sense even without a state mandate. But take a wild guess which states don’t have RPSs at all: Javier Zarracina Some states have voluntary RPSs while others have mandates backed by law. “In places that don’t have RPSs, the utilities don’t have as much motivation to develop renewables.” “The states that have stronger RPSs are the places where you see renewables being deployed more actively,” said Ian Baring-Gould, a technology deployment manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. While federal incentives like the production tax credit, which benefits wind energy installations, apply across the country, state-level programs make a major difference on the ground. The major driver to invest in wind in many states is renewable portfolio standards, which mandate a minimum amount of electricity to come from renewable sources, like hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants. So why else is the Southeast so devoid of wind power? Still, there are plenty of wind turbines in less breezy states out west like Idaho, which has 973 MW of capacity. ![]() So it makes sense that utilities are planting wind turbines in the places with the most wind. If you double the wind speed, you get eight times more power. The power you get from a wind turbine has a cubic relationship to the wind speed, he says. “Wind power is very sensitive to the wind speed, more than you might guess.” “The main difference between the southeastern US and the rest of the country is the intensity of the resource,” said Paul Veers, chief engineer at the National Wind Technology Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The Southeast, clearly, has a lot less wind. The areas in purple and red - the Great Plains states - have the fastest wind speeds and therefore the most wind energy available for harvest. This map of average wind speeds at a height of 80 meters, or 262 feet - the height that matters for most commercial wind turbines - illustrates one big reason for America’s wind disparity: Javier Zarracina And it turns out there are several reasons states like Alabama and Georgia are so far apart from states like Nebraska and Wyoming, and why it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to close the gap anytime soon. I wanted to understand what was going on here, so, naturally, I went looking for more maps. States don’t have equal wind resources or incentives ![]() It’s the best evidence we have that many parts of the US are being left behind in the wind power boom. And it pulls data from the US Wind Turbine Database, a years-long effort to map the gale of wind power sweeping the country. The above map of 57,636 wind turbines across the US is drawn from a terrific interactive website launched in April 2018 by the US Geological Survey, the American Wind Energy Association, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Right next to wind king Texas, you have 11 states with little to no installed wind power, including Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia.Īnd when you map where the clusters of wind turbines are physically located, the hole in the southeastern US becomes even more stark: Javier Zarracina Vast swaths of the country have been left out of the wind energy revolution, as you can see in this map of installed wind capacity by state:Īnd when you look at how much wind we’ve built per state since 1999, you can see how quickly wind has boomed in some areas, while others are stuck in the doldrums: Javier Zarracina ![]() Texas alone, with 22.6 gigawatts installed, would rank sixth in the world today in total wind capacity if it were its own country.īut wind power isn’t exploding everywhere across this great land of ours. “Wind power is an important part of America’s energy strategy,” said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry in March, while announcing $28.1 million in new funding for wind R&D. Since overall electricity demand is expected to hold fairly steady, that would fulfill more than one-third of the country’s needs. The US Department of Energy projects that we’ll have 404 gigawatts of wind energy capacity across the country by 2050, up from 90 GW today. Wind turbines have cropped up like dandelions across large areas of the US, and thousands more are coming.
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