Top 10 Things You Didnt Know About Wind Power (Advanced)

Get a load of the wind wisdom! This piece is part of the Energy.gov series spilling the beans on the "Top Things You Didn't Know About Energy."

• Ancient folks were no slouches; they've been riding the wind wave for eons. Early windmills were the OGs, using gusts to pulverize grain or hoist water. Fast forward to today, and modern wind turbines are the rockstars, spinning wind into electricity. Get the lowdown on how these wind wizards work.

• Present-day wind turbines are no simple Joe compared to the old-school prairie windmills. They're decked out with up to 8,000 different gizmos and gadgets.

• Brace yourself—wind turbines are titans. The blades are giants, stretching 210 feet, and the towers are skyscrapers, towering over 320 feet—out-towering even Lady Liberty. These bad boys are beefing up, too, packing more punch in the generator department. The typical capacity of utility-scale wind turbines in 2022 was 3.2 megawatts (MW), up 7% from the year before.

• More wind speed means more juiced-up electricity. To catch the wind's wild side, turbines are reaching for the skies. Check out the Energy Department’s wind maps to clock the average wind speeds in your neck of the woods and dig into opportunities for towering turbines in a report from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

• Forget imports—many bits and bobs of U.S.-installed wind turbines are born and bred right here, with a whopping 500-plus wind-centric factories scattered across the land. The U.S. wind industry is no small potatoes, boasting a workforce of 125,000 folks, including 23,543 in the manufacturing rodeo and 45,088 in the construction hustle.

• Picture this: offshore wind, the heavyweight champion powering bustling coastal metropolises. You've got mini-projects off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia, and a slew of megaprojects in the pipeline. Peep what the Energy Department is cooking up to crank up offshore wind in the U.S.

• Wind power isn't playing hard to get—it's everywhere. Utility-scale wind power (from turbines over 100 kilowatts) has pitched its tent in 42 states. At the close of 2022, 35 states, plus Puerto Rico, were flexing over 100 MW of wind muscle, with 23 towering above 1 gigawatt (GW), 19 bossing over 2 GW, and 17 commanding over 3 GW. And that's not all—distributed wind is sprinkled across all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

• The United States is the wind king, boasting a whopping 144,000 megawatts of wind capacity. In 2022, the U.S. wind crew slapped on an extra 8,500 MW of fresh muscle, dropping a cool $12 billion on the table.

• Hold onto your hats—wind energy won't break the bank. Contracts inked in recent years are rocking wind prices between 1.5–4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

• Wind energy isn't just a breeze—it's a powerhouse. More than 20% of total electricity generation in a dozen states is riding the wind wave, with Iowa and South Dakota hogging over 50%, and Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Nebraska comfortably coasting over 30%. In the grand scheme, wind energy flexed its muscles, delivering over 10% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2022.