Brush up on your knowledge of wind! This article is part of the Energy.gov series highlighting the "Top Things You Didn't Know About Energy" series.
10. Human civilizations have harnessed wind power for thousands of years. Early forms of windmills used wind to crush grain or pump water. Now, modern wind turbines use the wind to create electricity. Learn how a wind turbine works.
9. Today’s wind turbines are much more complicated machines than the traditional prairie windmill. A wind turbine has as many as 8,000 different components.
8. Wind turbines are big. Wind turbine blades average 200 feet long, and turbine towers average over 300 feet tall—about the height of the Statue of Liberty. The average nameplate capacity of turbines is also increasing, meaning they have more powerful generators. The average capacity of utility-scale wind turbines installed in 2021 was 3 megawatts (MW), up 9% from the previous year.
7. Higher wind speeds mean more electricity, and wind turbines are getting taller to reach higher heights above ground level where it’s even windier. See the Energy Department’s wind resource maps to find average wind speeds in your state or hometown and learn more about opportunities for taller wind turbines in a report from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
6. Many of the components of wind turbines installed in the United States are manufactured here, with more than 500 wind-related manufacturing facilities across the country. , The U.S. wind industry currently employs about 120,000 people, including 23,600 in manufacturing and 43,400 in construction
5. Offshore wind represents a major opportunity to provide power to highly populated coastal cities. There are small projects installed off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia, and the first commercial-scale project has been approved for installation off the coast of Massachusetts. See what the Energy Department is doing to develop offshore wind in the United States.
4. There is utility-scale wind power (from turbines over 100 kilowatts) installed in 41 states. There is distributed wind installed in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
3. The United States’ wind power capacity was about 136,000 megawatts at the end of 2021, making it the largest renewable energy source in the United States. In 2021, U.S. wind power capacity additions equaled 13,400 MW, representing $20 billion in investment in new wind power project installations.
2. Wind energy is affordable. Wind prices for power contracts signed in the last few years are 1.5–4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
1. Wind energy provides more than 20% of total electricity generation in 11 states, with more than 50% in Iowa and South Dakota, and more than 30% in Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. Overall, wind energy supplied more than 9% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2021.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/top-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-wind-power
Related BLOG
