Abstract

Over 60,000 utility-scale wind turbines are installed in the United States as of October, 2019, representing over 97 gigawatts of electric power capacity; US wind turbine installations continue to grow at a rapid pace. Yet, until April 2018, no publicly-available, regularly updated data source existed to describe those turbines and their locations. Under a cooperative research and development agreement, analysts from three organizations collaborated to develop and release the United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) - a publicly available, continuously updated, spatially rectified data source of locations and attributes of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States. Technical specifications and wind facility data, incorporated from five sources, undergo rigorous quality control. The location of each turbine is visually verified using high-resolution aerial imagery. The quarterly-updated data are available in a variety of formats, including an interactive web application, comma-separated values (CSV), shapefile, and application programming interface (API). The data are used widely by academic researchers, engineers and developers from wind energy companies, government agencies, planners, educators, and the general public.

Measurement(s)

geographic location • instrument attribute

Technology Type(s)

digital curation

Sample Characteristic - Environment

anthropogenic environment

Sample Characteristic - Location

United States of America

Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.11441310

Details

Title
A continuously updated, geospatially rectified database of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States
Author
Rand, Joseph T 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Kramer, Louisa A 2 ; Garrity, Christopher P 3 ; Hoen, Ben D 1 ; Diffendorfer Jay E 2 ; Hunt, Hannah E 4 ; Spears, Michael 1 

1  Electricity Markets and Policy Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA 
2  Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center, US Geological Survey, Denver, USA 
3  Eastern Energy Resources Science Center, US Geological Survey, Reston, USA 
4  American Wind Energy Association, Washington, USA 
Publication year
2020
Publication date
2020
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20524463
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0353-6
ProQuest document ID
2342394302
Copyright
This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.