The State of the Wind Industry. By Todd Woody, Grist, April 12, 2010. "The knock against wind is that despite the huge increases in capacity that have made the U.S. the world's biggest wind power -- with more than 35,000 megawatts installed -- all those turbines still satisfy less than 2% of the nation's demand for electricity. True enough, but the picture changes if you take a state-by-state look. Iowa, for instance, relies on wind farms to generate 14.2% of its electricity, according to the wind industry report. Wind power supplies 9.4% of Minnesota's electricity, 8.1% of North Dakota's, and 6.4% of Oregon's. In the American Wind Energy Association annual report [PDF, 64 pp] , there's a series of color-coded maps of wind-farm installations in the United States between 2000 and 2009. Those states with significant numbers of turbines are colored in shades of blue, those with few or none are white. At the beginning of the decade, broad swaths of the country were blank slates, with California the only dark blue state along with a handful of light blue states. By decade's end, most of the West and wind-swept Great Plains states as well as parts of the Northeast were a sea of blue of varying hues. Only the wind-poor Southeast and a handful of other states remained as white spots on the map...
"[However,] 'The inadequacy of the nation's electric grid is a major impediment to the continued growth of the wind industry,' the report noted. 'Many wind projects that have connected to the grid are forced to curtail a significant amount of their output or are facing low or even negative electric prices because there is inadequate transmission to carry their full output.' There's an astounding 300,000 megawatts worth of planned projects seeking connection to the grid, only a fraction of which is likely to get built due to transmission constraints, according to the report."
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