Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with public and private partners, is pleased to announce the release of the most comprehensive publicly available database yet of U.S. wind turbine locations and characteristics.

The United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) will allow unparalleled ability for government agencies and others to conduct research and make planning decisions.

The USWTDB, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Energy Technologies Office and developed as part of a public-private partnership with the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is more accurate and comprehensive, and will be regularly updated more often than existing publicly available wind turbine datasets. Using the USWTDB Viewer, federal agencies, other researchers, and the general public will be able to explore current wind installations, download and share data, and conduct a wide range of meaningful analyses.

"Our collaborative arrangement with AWEA and USGS allowed us to merge the separate proprietary datasets from each of our organizations and combine them with those from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which enables an unprecedented view of the U.S. turbine fleet," says Ben Hoen, a research scientist and the project's lead at Berkeley Lab. 

For example, the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration have been using the database already to perform crucial operational impact assessments of wind turbines on radar. Other examples of uses for the data include studying wind energy and wildlife interactions, reviewing economic impacts assessments of wind energy's deployment, and better understanding of local wind deployment trends.

"With the release of the USWTDB, data that were previously scattered across many datasets and in some cases unavailable to the public have been released to the public in a single package", says Joe Rand, Berkeley Lab researcher who managed the complicated task of merging the various datasets. "The Database currently contains data from more than 57,000 turbines constructed from the 1980s through 2018, in more than 1,700 wind power projects spanning 43 states plus Puerto Rico and Guam", he adds.

The USWTDB Viewer, the development of which was led by Chris Garrity, Louisa Kramer and James Diffendorfer of the USGS Eastern Energy Resources Science Center, is unprecedented in its ability to search and sort the U.S. wind turbine fleet. Users can interact with the data using multiple filters and colorings to allow wind projects across counties, states, or regions to be quickly scanned for unique qualities. 

"Wind power's rapid growth as part of the diverse U.S. electricity mix can be seen and better understood with this wind turbine dataset," said John Hensley, Senior Director of Research and Analytics for AWEA. "We're pleased to have contributed AWEA data to this valuable resource, working in close concert with Berkeley Lab and USGS to advance the public interest." Berkeley Lab and USGS worked closely with Hannah Hunt, AWEA's Deputy Director of Electricity Policy & Demand to coordinate this project.

The full dataset can be downloaded with a few clicks in a variety of formats, and users can connect to the underlying data and incorporate the Viewer into their own website. The database includes wind turbine locations and characteristics, including make and model, total height, hub height, rotor diameter, year of installation, and rated capacity to produce electricity.

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