A Snapshot of American Wind Energy
By Lucas Principe, Environmental Science and Philosophy, 2020
This article was originally published as part of Issue 35: Motion.
The Mechanism
Wind power, which is generated from wind turbines, harnesses the energy of wind currents to create electricity. The currents push on the slanted blades of the wind turbine and flow off one side to rotate them the opposite way. These turbines are connected to a rotor that rotates in a generator to create electricity.
Understanding Energy
Wind energy is typically measured in Megawatts (MW). A watt is the standard unit of power and represents the rate at which electricity is being used at any given moment. One megawatt, or 1,000,000 watts, is roughly equivalent to the power produced by 10 standard automobile engines. The average 1.5 MW wind turbine will produce enough electricity to power around 332 American households for a year.
Why Wind
Those elegant air currents that speed over our heads each day are a pollution-free, renewable, and highly abundant source of energy. As long as the wind keeps blowing, turbines can continue to gather electricity for us. Plus, wind turbines are incredibly space efficient, and prices for wind energy have decreased significantly over the past 40 years.
Current Capacity
As of the most recent measurement in October of 2017, there is now around 85,000 MW of installed wind capacity in the United States. This breaks down to more than 52,000 wind turbines spinning gleefully in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
Growth
Currently, there is around 14,000 MW of wind power infrastructure in construction and 16,000 MW more in development for next year. This represents a 27 percent increase from 2016. Additionally, in 2010 wind energy accounted for 2.3 percent of the nation’s electricity generated while in 2016 it accounted for nearly 6 percent: more than doubling its portfolio in only six years.
The All-Stars
Running away with this category is Texas with 21,000 MW installed. Next is Iowa (7,000 MW), Oklahoma (6,600 MW), California (5,600 MW), and Kansas (5,110 MW). Massachusetts, our lovely home, does better than some states in the northeast with 115 MW installed. Yet it still drags behind the likes of New York and Pennsylvania, each with over 1,000 MW installed.
Needs Improvement
Sadly, much of the southeast United states has virtually no utility-scale wind capacity or wind infrastructure installed. This is due to two reasons. The first is low average wind speeds in these regions. More importantly, however, it is due to a lack of Renewable Portfolio Standards, the percentage of energy that is required to be generated from renewables, from state governments who don’t feel a need to invest in wind power. This is despite the fact that the Department of Energy has repeatedly stated that wind can be a viable source of renewable electricity in all 50 states.
