Explore every American wind farm and wind factory on AWEA interactive map

Our first-ever American Wind Week is in full swing, delivering exciting updates on the falling costs of wind, progress in the offshore wind market, and overwhelming public support for wind across the country.

But we’re not stopping there.

Today we’ve released a new interactive map that allows anyone to easily view the location of every utility-scale wind project and wind-related manufacturing facility in the United States, visualizing the growth of America’s largest source of renewable energy capacity over time.

Why did we build this map? We know that wind power is providing economic benefits to all 50 states, creating jobs and deploying wind projects in rural communities each year. This map helps to visualize, for the first time, the footprint of the U.S. wind industry, and in more detail than ever before.

The default map view shows all online utility-scale wind projects. However, there’s also a time-lapse feature built in to show the progress of wind power capacity built over time. The time-lapse feature begins in 1981, when the first modern projects were built in California. It then continues through 2017, where wind project development is now strongest in heartland states like Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

Beyond the time lapse, users can zoom in and click on individual symbols to find more details about each online wind project, including the name of the project, when it came online, the size of the project, the number of wind turbines, and its congressional district.

The map also includes the locations of the more than 500 active U.S. wind-related manufacturing facilities. When users click on each factory, they’ll discover the name of the company and the type of wind component they produce.

AWEA’s new map uses only a small percentage of the full wind project and manufacturing data available to AWEA members through Market Database Pro, a comprehensive, interactive database of all online, under construction, and advanced development wind projects, and all active wind-related manufacturing facilities. Over 50 data points are provided at both the project and turbine level, with advanced interactive mapping services including filtered search capabilities, summary maps, and political boundaries.

The wind industry currently supports over 100,000 U.S. jobs across all 50 states, with nearly 85,000 MW of installed capacity at the end of the second quarter of 2017. That’s enough to power 25 million American homes. Take time to explore our new map to discover where these economic benefits are being delivered.

 

Hannah Hunt

 

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