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posted by mrpg on Sunday May 06 2018, @11:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoosh dept.

Investments in and development of wind power in the US are very unevenly distributed. That is shown in four animated maps at Vox in their article, the stunningly lopsided growth of wind power in the US, in 4 maps. They explore why a huge swath of the country has almost no wind turbines at all.

[...] The major driver to invest in wind in many states is renewable portfolio standards, which mandate a minimum amount of electricity to come from renewable sources, like hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants. While federal incentives like the production tax credit, which benefits wind energy installations, apply across the country, state-level programs make a major difference on the ground.

“The states that have stronger RPSs are the places where you see renewables being deployed more actively,” said Ian Baring-Gould, a technology deployment manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “In places that don’t have RPSs, the utilities don’t have as much motivation to develop renewables.”

Take a wild guess which states don’t have RPSs

Wind speeds are not even around the country, so turbine distribution is not expected to be either. However, there is a long way to go before the turbine distribution reaches parity with the potential.


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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 07 2018, @12:50AM (6 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 07 2018, @12:50AM (#676506) Journal

    I'm color blind, so those damned color coded charts often look like gobbledygook to me. But, please, take another look at that wind speed map. Tell me if I'm wrong: California's wind speed is mostly the same as those south eastern states, with significant portions of California even lower. Unless my eyes are deceiving me, Cali has inferior wind resources to the southeastern US. Yet, Cali was an early adopter of wind turbine energy. In fact, California was the first place that I ever saw a wind turbine.

    Your political intrigue and financial incentives are spot on, however. The incentives map pretty clearly match the production map.

    I'll add that maybe there should be a chart for elevation. Those southeaster states are mostly sea level, or a few hundred feet in elevation. States with wind production are all considerably higher. If/when the southeast ever does go strong with wind production, it's going to happen in elevated areas. If you imagine the Appalachians drawn into that map of current wind production, then you can see the area in each of those states where wind power will be most productive.

    I do agree with your clickbait assessment. There is little chance that we could convince Vox to do their article over, to include all the data, instead of their selected bits of "important" data.

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday May 07 2018, @01:33AM (2 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 07 2018, @01:33AM (#676525) Journal

    California's wind speed is mostly the same as those south eastern states, with significant portions of California even lower.

    I would say that's right, looking at the graph. But in California there are also areas of orange and even a little red (6.5 - 7.5 m/s), whereas I don't see any visible signs of that south of about West Virginia and east of about Louisiana. And many of the wind installations look to be in those areas of higher wind.

    Plus, California has a higher population density, which might skew the results--the graphs show total wind deployment and turbine capacity in the absolute, not relative to other electricity generation.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 07 2018, @02:14AM (1 child)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 07 2018, @02:14AM (#676537) Journal

      Thank you - and, yes, looking closer, I can see some of that orange and red. Makes sense!

      • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday May 07 2018, @03:35PM

        by nitehawk214 (1304) on Monday May 07 2018, @03:35PM (#676670)

        It's not just you. The scale on the wind map makes no sense. There is a band of red between the two top-end blue bands. I think that is an editing mistake, but its Vox, so what can you expect?

        --
        "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @04:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @04:49AM (#676554)

    I'm color blind, so those damned color coded charts often look like gobbledygook to me

    I encountered similar stuff back in the day.
    My first computer video setup had no color (Hercules Graphics Card).
    It would have been so easy for guys who included drawings in their stuff to have made the different colors also different textures (dots, stripes, crosshatch, etc.).

    As my eyesight gets crappier with age, I appreciate developers|webmasters who have their grandpas|handicapped folks check their work.

    For similar reasons (empathy with those whose sight is even worse than mine and who require a screenreader), when I link to stuff, I try to use #FragmentIdentifiers to index the page past the navigation and self-promotion and other crap and down to the start of the content.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @07:35AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 07 2018, @07:35AM (#676575)

    the state as a whole, yes. But there are places like San Gorgonio Pass (near Palm Springs), the mountains between Oakland and Livermore, etc. that are quite windy most of the time because of their geography, much like the Columbia Gorge & Plateau. Those areas get good steady winds too, and are close to feed either huge population area grids or feed into the BPA backbone.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 07 2018, @06:56PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday May 07 2018, @06:56PM (#676742)

      Surprisingly, despite significant wind every single time I go there, and a huge need for power next door, the very green people have yet to install any turbine along the Malibu coast.