I found a couple of very interesting sites on the state of Wind energy production in the US in the last couple of days.
The first is the website of the US Dept of Energy’s Wind and Hydropower technologies program. It includes a page which charts the rollout of wind power across the US over time.
You can see how total installed capacity went from 11,575 MW in 2006 to 16,596 MW in 2007 - nearly a 70% increase in a single year. Surprisingly (to me at least) Texas leads the field with 4,296 MW, roughly 25% of the entire nation’s capacity.
Even more interesting though is the site of the American Wind Energy Association. On their projects page for example, they have a breakdown all the wind energy statistics for each state and a map colour coded by rollout.
You see that although Texas has rolled out 4,296 MW, it has a total potential capacity of 136,100 MW so it is far from saturation.
And then at the other end of the scale laggards like Michigan have a total potential of 7,460 MW but have only rolled out 52.8 MW. Similarly Nevada has a potential of 5,740 MW and have a total rollout of? 0 MW. Yup, 0 MW! Anyone reading this from Nevada or Michigan want to try to explain why this might be?
