Explaining the decline of US wind output power density

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the decline in US wind power density from 2001 to 2021, attributing it to decreased system efficiency despite increased wind input, and discusses implications for land use and turbine design.

Contribution

It provides a detailed decomposition of factors affecting wind power density, highlighting the role of system efficiency decline and changes in turbine design over two decades.

Findings

Wind input to turbines increased over 2001-2021.

System efficiency decreased, reducing output power density.

Higher hub heights increased wind availability but site quality slightly declined.

Abstract

US wind power generation has grown significantly over the last decades, in line with the number and average size of operating turbines. However, wind power density has declined, both measured in terms of wind power output per rotor swept area as well as per spacing area. To study this effect, we present a decomposition of US wind power generation data for the period 2001--2021 and examine how changes in input power density and system efficiency affected output power density. Here, input power density refers to the amount of wind available to turbines, system efficiency refers to the share of power in the wind flowing through rotor swept areas which is converted to electricity and output power density refers to the amount of wind power generated per rotor swept area. We show that, while power input available to turbines has increased in the period 2001--2021, system efficiency has decreased. In total, this has caused a decline in output power density in the last 10 years, explaining higher land-use requirements. The decrease in system efficiency is linked to the decrease in specific power, i.e. the ratio between the nameplate capacity of a turbine and its rotor swept area. Furthermore, we show that the wind available to turbines has increased substantially due to increases in the average hub height of turbines since 2001. However, site quality has slightly decreased in this period.