U.S. Wind Projects Get Bigger By Building Up (Not Adding Turbines)
The content that follows was originally published on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance website at http://www.ilsr.org/us-wind-projects-get-bigger-building-not-adding-turbines/Have U.S. wind projects hit a size sweet spot? While average project capacity continues to grow, it’s largely because of increasing turbine size rather than adding more turbines to a wind farm.
The following chart illustrates, showing how the capacity of the average American wind project has more than doubled in a decade (to nearly 90 MW in 2009), but that almost all that growth can be attributed to a more than doubling in the average turbine size (from 0.71 MW to 1.74 MW).
Although the American definition of distributed generation may differ, it may be that the U.S. isn’t so different from Germany, where the country’s 27,000 MW of wind power is spread over 3,300 wind projects with an average project size of 9 megawatts. It may be that smaller wind projects are encountering fewer political and transmission barriers than their larger neighbors.
Caveat. The linked post shows an average of all installed German wind projects, and it would be interesting to see how Germany’s size progression compares to the U.S.
