Digging Deeper in Wind Data

Figures from annual reports are always interesting, but I usually want to find out what they mean. I was a little surprised at how strong wind development was last year, according to figures released yesterday by the American Wind Energy Association, when the 2009 started out so badly. Almost 10,000 megawatts were built for the year, the fifth consecutive record, which brought the total to more than 35,000 megawatts in wind capacity.

Credit obviously goes to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which everybody says saved the wind industry from total collapse. Nearly 10,000 megawatts is an impressive total when you consider that before the stimulus package passed last year the industry was expecting up to a 50 percent drop from the 2008 records, which would have put last year's total at something a little over 4,000 megawatts. The AWEA fourth quarter report can be seen here and in other places in this newsletter.

But it's always interesting to dig through any report. One comment got my attention. "The capacity installed map is starting to look like the wind resource map," Kathy Belyeu, AWEA's manager of industry information said in passing during an AWEA webcast. The "wind belt" from the Dakotas to Texas and the Pacific Northwest are where the action is.

As impressive as 10,000 megawatts sounds, one thing that's hard to miss is how top-heavy the state list is starting to look. Almost a quarter of that, 2,292 megawatts, was in Texas alone, the national leader for the past several years. Iowa, second overall in capacity and third for 2009 additions, came in at 870 megawatts. So that's one-third of new construction in two states; a half-full or half-empty glass, if there ever was one. New states like Indiana moved up on the yearly list, with 905 megawatts added in 2009.
 
Here's a decidedly half-empty glass. It's hard to miss that the former leader, California, the place that kept wind on the map for 20 years, is falling further and further behind. It still comes in at number 3 in the installed resource base at just under 2,800 megawatts, but the yearly installation of 277 megawatts was mid-pack, in the neighborhood of relative newcomers like Oklahoma and Utah. If the state with the most aggressive mandates in the country has trouble matching sparsely populated states - and those happen to be ones without mandates - what chance does California have it making its deadlines? A question worth asking, even if it's one beyond the scope of a report like this one.

A complete AWEA report with more data and analysis of manufacturing and market share will be released in April.

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