U.S. wind reserves accessible to transmission lines

Recent advances in wind power technology, coupled with federal incentives for deployment established as part of the 1992 Energy Policy Act, have resulted in a noticeable increase in discussions of and plans for wind power projects in many areas of the US. Good wind resources are widely distributed, but a common perception is that much of the land with good wind resources is unavailable for development because of environmental and land use restrictions. Furthermore, results of some earlier wind resource and transmission studies have contributed to the notions that the wind resources are located far from load centers and that existing transmission facilities and transmission requirements will make the development of such resources infeasible. The first issue has been addressed on a national level. As part of its ongoing work with wind resource assessment, the Wind Energy Resource Assessment team from Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL, now part of the Wind Energy Research Center at NREL) has produced estimates of the available wind resource, accounting for environmental and land use restrictions. This work builds on the PNL efforts and addresses the second issue by examining the amount of wind resource that is within a short distance of the existing transmission lines. more » The analysis was done with a geographic information system (GIS) program. Results indicate that a large amount of wind resource is near existing transmission facilities. « less