4 maps that show who’s being left behind in America’s wind-power boom

Why does a huge swath of the country have hardly any wind turbines at all?

By Umair Irfan and Javier Zarracina | Updated Mar 28, 2019, 12:50pm EDT

President Trump has been mocking wind power as an unreliable source of energy lately. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, he asserted that the United States, “would have been powered by wind, which wouldn’t have worked by the way because it only blows sometimes and lots of problems come about.”

In fact, wind turbines have cropped up like dandelions across large areas of the US, and thousands more are coming. The US Department of Energy projects that we’ll have 404 gigawatts of wind energy capacity across the country by 2050, up from 90 GW today. Since overall electricity demand is expected to hold steady, that would fulfill more than one-third of the country’s needs.

“Wind power is an important part of America’s energy strategy,” said Trump’s Secretary of Energy Rick Perry on Thursday, while announcing $28.1 million in new funding for wind R&D.

Texas alone, with 22.6 gigawatts installed, would rank sixth in the world today in total wind capacity if it were its own country.

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