History of renewable power
From a Vermont hilltop in 1941 to the wind, sun and batteries now filling the queues, twenty-one places where renewable power came of age. A story in 21 stops on the Wattlas map of the North American grid.
Act I · 1941–1991
Grandpa's Knob (1941)
Late on October 19, 1941, on a bare 2,000-foot summit in western Vermont, a pair of steel blades 66 feet long and eight tons apiece came up to speed, and the largest wind turbine the world had yet seen began feeding a utility's grid. Palmer Cosslett Putnam had drawn General Electric and the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation into the venture, and its 1.25 MW went unmatched by any wind machine for almost forty years. It ran on and off through the war until one of its blades broke away in March 1945. Then Putnam's team did the arithmetic that would shadow wind and sunlight for the rest of the century. A small fleet of these machines would cost about $190 for every kilowatt, and the utility valued what they could produce at $125. The prototype came down in 1946, and with coal and oil cheap almost nobody tried again for a generation, though Putnam set down everything he had learned in a 1948 book, Power From The Wind, which waited on the shelf for the day energy stopped being cheap.
On the map: The dot marks the Smith-Putnam wind turbine on Grandpa's Knob in Castleton, Vermont, dated 1941. No wind farm the map lists as operating stands within 80 km. The closest, Deerfield Wind, 30 MW from 2017, is about 90 km to the south.
Sources: Wikipedia, Smith–Putnam wind turbine
Murray Hill (1954)
On April 26, 1954, the morning after Bell Telephone Laboratories showed off its silicon solar battery, The New York Times told its readers the device might mark the beginning of a new era, one in which the almost limitless energy of the sun would be harnessed for civilization. The prophecy was about half a century early, and what held it back was price. Our World in Data puts the cost of a solar module in 1976, more than twenty years after the demonstration at Murray Hill, at $106 for every watt in today's money, a price that made sense on a satellite and almost nowhere on Earth. Before a panel could win a utility's business that price had to fall by more than ninety-nine percent, and much of this story follows the fall. New Jersey, where the cell was born, became one of the first places to pay for solar at scale. In 2004 the state began requiring its electricity suppliers to buy certificates from solar generators, panels spread across warehouse roofs and closed landfills, and by 2011 only California had more solar capacity installed.
On the map: The dot marks the Bell Labs practical solar cell at Murray Hill, New Jersey, dated 1954. Murray Hill Solar, a 1 MW array from 2011, lies under 300 m away, and New Jersey has 345 solar plants the map lists as operating, about 1.3 GW.
Sources: pv magazine USA, April 25, 2024, Our World in Data, Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?, Wikipedia, Solar power in New Jersey
Altamont Pass (1981–1986)
The oil shocks of the 1970s did what Putnam's book could not, and California made the most of them. PURPA, signed in 1978, obliged utilities to buy power from small independent generators at the cost they avoided by not making it themselves, and federal tax credits passed that same year paid part of the price of wind and solar equipment. Governor Jerry Brown's California added a credit of 25 percent of its own, and the state's utility commission wrote standard contracts that paid a wind farm for years at prices pegged to what it cost a utility to burn natural gas. Investors went looking for wind and found it in the mountain passes between the cool coast and the hot interior. Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco Bay, filled first, and by 1985 half of all the wind electricity in the world came from its hills. At Tehachapi, above the Mojave, James Dehlsen's Zond bought nearly every turbine the Danish firm Vestas could make, and the sturdy Danish designs replaced the American machines that kept breaking. When oil prices fell and the credits ran out in the middle of the decade, the rush stopped almost as fast as it had begun. It left the passes crowded with small, fast machines that proved deadly to the golden eagles hunting their slopes. Zond came through the bust and went on to design turbines of its own.
On the map: The dot marks Altamont Pass, dated 1981. Within 15 km the map lists seven wind plants as operating, about 320 MW, the oldest from 2004, and Kola Energy Center, a 400 MW battery from 2025, stands about 9 km to the east.
Sources: SCE, Qualifying Facilities background, Wikipedia, Energy Tax Act, Gizmodo, California's hills are haunted by the ghosts of wind energy, Wikipedia, Wind power in the United States, Wikipedia, Altamont Pass wind farm, Wikipedia, James Dehlsen, Wikipedia, Tehachapi Pass wind farm, Paul Gipe, The Great Wind Rush of 99
The Mojave mirrors (1984–1991)
The same contracts that raised the windmills also paid for the strangest power plants California had seen. Fifty kilometers to the east, near Daggett, the Department of Energy's Solar One had shown in 1982 that a field of mirrors could run a steam turbine. A company called Luz bet that long curved troughs would do it more cheaply, and it sold the output of every plant it built to Southern California Edison as a qualifying facility under PURPA. Each plant came in larger than the one before, and the cost of their power fell from about 24 cents a kilowatt-hour at the first to about 8 cents at the ninth, here at Harper Lake. Through a decade of summer afternoons, the hours Edison needed most, the five plants at Kramer Junction averaged more than their rated output. Even so, energy prices had fallen while the tax credits were phased out, and when California was slow to renew a property tax exemption for solar plants, Luz could not finance its tenth. It filed for bankruptcy on November 25, 1991, having built nearly all of the world's solar electricity. The troughs outlived their builder by thirty years, and around their old fields the land has filled with rows of flat photovoltaic panels and containers of batteries that do the same work for a fraction of the cost.
On the map: The dot marks Solar Energy Generating Systems at Harper Lake, dated 1984. Within 5 km the map lists six solar and battery plants as operating, about 810 MW, among them the Mojave Solar Project, a 275 MW solar thermal plant from 2014, and Lockhart Solar PV, 154 MW from 2023.
Sources: NREL, Parabolic Trough Solar Power for Competitive U.S. Markets, OSTI, N. D. Becker, Demise of Luz, a case study, Wikipedia, Solar Energy Generating Systems, EIA-860M
Act II · 1992–2008
Buffalo Ridge and Iowa (1992–1999)
When the wind came back it came back on different terms. The Energy Policy Act that George H. W. Bush signed in October 1992 created the production tax credit, 1.5 cents for every kilowatt-hour a new wind farm delivered during its first ten years. The credits of the 1980s had paid for machines whether they turned or not. This one paid only for power, which rewarded the sturdy turbine over the showy one. The customers came from the upper Midwest. Iowa had ordered its investor-owned utilities in 1983 to buy 105 MW of wind power, and in 1994 Minnesota struck an unlikely bargain. Northern States Power was running out of room for spent fuel at its Prairie Island nuclear plant, beside the Prairie Island Indian Community, and the Legislature let it store the waste in steel casks on condition that it buy 425 MW of wind by 2002. The best wind within reach blew along Buffalo Ridge, a long, gentle rise that divides the rivers running to the Mississippi from those running to the Missouri. Enron, which had bought the Tehachapi company Zond in 1997, finished Lake Benton I there in 1998 with 143 of Zond's new 750 kW turbines, and by June 1999 another 257 of them were turning at Storm Lake in northwest Iowa, 193 MW sold to MidAmerican and IES Utilities. More than half of the country's new wind that year went up in the two states, racing the credit's first deadline. The credit lapsed and returned again and again after that, and each time it lapsed, the orders dried up.
On the map: The ring is Lake Benton I, 103.5 MW of wind from 1998, on Buffalo Ridge. Storm Lake 1 and II, 182 MW from 1999, stand about 195 km to the south-southeast in Iowa. The view holds 109 wind plants the map lists as operating, about 6.5 GW, and seven of them date from 1998 or 1999.
Sources: CRS R43453, The Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit, Laws of Minnesota 1994, chapter 641, MPR, Prairie Island timeline, Wikipedia, Wind power in Iowa, Paul Gipe, The Great Wind Rush of 99, NS Energy, Growing in the wind, Wikipedia, James Dehlsen
West Texas and the CREZ lines (1999–2013)
Texas wrote its own rule in 1999. Senate Bill 7, signed by Governor George W. Bush, opened the state's electricity market to competition and told power sellers to add 2,000 MW of new renewable capacity by 2009, with a market in renewable energy credits to let them trade their way there. The developers went first to the high mesas around McCamey, an oil town in the Permian Basin, and in 2001 they raised 683 MW of wind there, King Mountain among them, 214 turbines along the rims of a single mesa. The lines out of McCamey could carry only about 400 MW, and on the windiest days operators had to hold the turbines back. The farms spread north and east anyway, past Sweetwater to Roscoe, where the world's largest wind farm was finished in 2009, and that year ERCOT curtailed 17 percent of its wind output because the power had no way to reach the cities to the east. The Legislature had written the remedy four years earlier, in Senate Bill 20, which raised the state's target and ordered its regulators to map the windiest ground into Competitive Renewable Energy Zones and to plan the lines to serve them before the farms were built. The last of those lines was energized at the end of 2013, close to 3,600 miles of high-voltage wire that cost about $7 billion, and within a year the curtailment had nearly vanished. Texas reached its 2025 goal of 10,000 MW fifteen years early, and the mesas where it began are now ringed by solar farms and batteries.
On the map: The dot marks the Roscoe Wind Farm, dated 2009, and King Mountain, 278 MW from 2001, stands near McCamey about 210 km to the southwest. The view holds 70 wind plants the map lists as operating, about 14.5 GW, with 41 solar plants, about 7.5 GW, and 24 battery plants, about 1.6 GW.
Sources: Wikipedia, Wind power in Texas, Desai and Pemberton, Sandia EESAT 2003, Wikipedia, King Mountain Wind Farm, Texas Legislature, SB 20, Texas Tribune, October 14, 2013, Utility Dive, Texas CREZ lines, Wikipedia, Roscoe Wind Farm
Act III · 2009–2021
The Carrizo Plain (2009–2014)
In 1983 an oil company switched on the largest photovoltaic plant in the world on this remote grassland. Atlantic Richfield's solar arm spread about 100,000 panels over 177 acres of the Carrizo Plain, 5.2 MW at its peak, and fed the power to Pacific Gas and Electric. A flaw in the panels made them lose output as they aged, the plant shut down after about a decade, and by the late 1990s the panels had been taken down and sold off for cabins and small rooftops. When solar returned to the plain it came at a scale ARCO could not have imagined, and two laws brought it. California's renewables portfolio standard, passed in 2002 and raised again and again since, required the state's utilities to buy a rising share of their power from renewable sources, and PG&E went looking for whole square miles of sunny ranchland. Then the Recovery Act of 2009, written in the depths of a recession, let developers take a cash grant from the Treasury in place of tax credits they had no profits to use, and it backed the largest projects with federal loan guarantees. The Department of Energy guaranteed a $1.2 billion loan for California Valley Solar Ranch in September 2011, and its 250 MW reached full operation in October 2013. Topaz, across the plain, was finished the following year, and the grassland that had held the world's largest solar array in 1983 held two of the largest in the country again.
On the map: The dot marks Topaz Solar Farms, dated 2014. The map lists Topaz Solar Farm at 586 MW from 2013, the oldest solar plant on the map of 500 MW or more, and California Valley Solar Ranch, 250 MW from 2012, about 17 km to the southeast.
Sources: Center for Land Use Interpretation, Original Carrizo Solar Power Plant Site, OSTI, Carrisa Plains photovoltaic power plant, 1984–1987 performance, CPUC, Renewables Portfolio Standard, CRS R43453, The Renewable Electricity Production Tax Credit, DOE Loan Programs Office, California Valley Solar Ranch
Ontario's feed-in tariff (2009–2019)
A homeowner in Ontario in the fall of 2009 could bolt solar panels to the roof and sign a contract that paid up to 80.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour they made. The province had set out to build a market for clean energy the way Germany had, by guaranteeing a fixed price to anyone who would build it, and wind farms were offered 13.5 cents. The Green Energy Act behind the offer had gone before the legislature that February, in a province whose public power system had been founded a century earlier on the falling water of Niagara and whose government had promised to close its coal plants. The rules required that a set share of each project's equipment and labor come from Ontario, and in January 2010 a consortium led by Samsung, the Korean conglomerate, agreed to develop 2,000 MW of wind and 500 MW of solar in the province and to build factories to supply them. More than 40,000 applications for the small contracts arrived within two years. The fixed prices showed up as a rising charge on every electricity bill, and in 2013 the province began replacing the large contracts with competitive bids. Japan and the European Union had taken the local content rules to the World Trade Organization, which found them unlawful, and Ontario dropped them in steps through 2014. In April of that year the last coal plant in Ontario shut down, and the province became the first place in North America to give up coal for power. The Green Energy Act was repealed on January 1, 2019, and by then the wind and solar farms it had paid for stood across the southwest of the province.
On the map: The ring is South Kent, 270 MW of wind that the map credits to Samsung and Pattern Energy. Ontario has 92 wind plants and 142 solar plants on the map, about 5.4 GW and 1.9 GW, and no coal plant. Oneida Energy Storage, a 250 MW battery from 2025, is the only battery the map shows in Canada.
Sources: Wikipedia, Green Energy Act, 2009, Wikipedia, Electricity policy of Ontario, Wikipedia, Samsung, WTO, DS412, Canada, Renewable Energy Generation Sector, WTO, DS426, Canada, Feed-in Tariff Program
Iowa and the data centers (2010–2024)
Ontario paid for clean power through its bills, and the next great buyers of wind were companies that wanted it for themselves. Google had begun a data center at Council Bluffs, on the Missouri across from Omaha, in 2007, and in February 2010 federal regulators let a Google subsidiary buy and sell electricity at market prices. On July 20 of that year it agreed to buy 114 MW of Iowa wind from NextEra Energy for twenty years at a fixed price. Facebook began building a data center at Altoona, outside Des Moines, in 2013 and asked for a wind farm to be built to match it, Microsoft built a cluster of its own in West Des Moines, and by 2014 Google's investment at Council Bluffs had reached $1.5 billion. MidAmerican Energy raised one wind farm after another across the corn and soybean country. In 2019 Iowa became the first state to draw more than 40 percent of its power from the wind, and by 2024 the share had passed 60 percent, more than any other source. The contracts spread far beyond Iowa, and by 2024 Google alone had signed more than 170 agreements for more than 22 GW of clean power to run its data centers.
On the map: Wind plants and data centers share the state. Iowa has 122 wind plants the map lists as operating, about 13 GW, and 35 of them, about 7.6 GW, are MidAmerican Energy's. Of the 53 existing data centers the map shows in Iowa, 38 belong to Microsoft, Google and Meta.
Sources: Wikipedia, Google Energy, Google, Reducing our carbon footprint with clean energy (July 20, 2010), Wikipedia, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Wikipedia, Altoona, Iowa, Wikipedia, West Des Moines, Iowa, Wikipedia, Wind power in Iowa
Oahu's rooftops (2010–2023)
Sunlight paid off faster on Oahu than almost anywhere else in the country, because the island made most of its electricity from oil carried across the Pacific. Net metering let a homeowner run the meter backward at the full retail price, and as panels grew cheaper the roofs of the island's suburbs filled with them. By 2014 more than 40,000 rooftop systems were connected across the islands, more than one customer in ten, and Hawaiian Electric began to limit new connections. In 2015 net metering was closed to newcomers, and that same year Hawaii became the first state to set a goal of drawing all of its electricity from renewable sources, by 2045. On the Big Island a geothermal plant in Puna had been drawing on the heat of Kilauea since 1993. On Oahu the state's last coal plant, 203 MW at Kapolei that had burned since 1992, closed in September 2022, and in December 2023 a 185 MW battery went into service less than 3 km away, able to hold 565 MWh of midday sun for the evening, though oil still made two thirds of the state's electricity that year.
On the map: The ring is Kapolei Energy Storage, a 185 MW battery from 2023. The five oil plants the map lists as operating on Oahu hold about 1,300 MW, against 19 solar plants, about 500 MW, and three wind farms, 127 MW. Rooftop panels do not appear on the map.
Sources: Wikipedia, Solar power in Hawaii, Wikipedia, Hawaiian Electric Industries, Wikipedia, Energy in Hawaii, EIA-860M
Ivanpah (2014)
Ivanpah was the grandchild of Solar One, three towers ringed by mirrors and built with the help of the same federal loan program that financed the Carrizo Plain, and when it opened in February 2014 it was the largest solar thermal plant in the world. It was already behind. The panels it was meant to outperform had been getting cheaper every year, and the fall did not slow. Our World in Data finds that electricity from solar photovoltaic plants became 88 percent cheaper over the fifteen years from 2009, and the module that had cost more than a hundred dollars a watt in 1976 now sells for less than forty cents. A tower plant needs a steam turbine and a crew to run it, where a photovoltaic farm needs little more than panels and inverters. Within two years two photovoltaic plants rose on the desert flats beside Ivanpah, Stateline and Silver State South, and in 2025 a 200 MW battery joined them, storing midday sun for the evening, a promise Solar Two's molten salt had once made for towers. Ivanpah's power had been sold to Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison for about $200 a megawatt-hour. When its owners moved in 2025 to end those contracts and close the plant, the state's regulators refused that December, worried about keeping the lights on, and required two of the three towers to keep running. The map lists no solar thermal plant newer than 2014.
On the map: The dot marks Ivanpah, dated 2014, and the map lists its three units at 393 MW, all operating. The map lists six solar thermal plants as operating, about 990 MW in all, against 7,353 photovoltaic plants, about 176 GW. Stateline Solar, 300 MW of panels, is 7 km to the northeast.
Sources: Wikipedia, Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, Our World in Data, Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?, EIA-860M
Block Island (2016)
Offshore wind reached American waters by way of a small island. For years the great hope had been Cape Wind, 130 turbines planned for Nantucket Sound from 2001, but the fight over it outlasted its financing, and in 2017 its developer gave up the lease without raising a single tower. Deepwater Wind started smaller, with five 6 MW turbines about 3.8 miles off Block Island that began sending power ashore in December 2016, the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The same company had already staked a claim to the open Atlantic farther out. In July 2013, at the federal government's first competitive auction of renewable energy leases at sea, it won two tracts east of the island, and they became South Fork, Revolution and Sunrise Wind. Leases off Massachusetts and New Jersey followed. Small as it was, the Block Island project had shown that a wind farm could be built and paid for in American seas, and most of the farms that followed it were planned at more than twenty times its size.
On the map: The dot marks the Block Island Wind Farm, dated 2016, which the map lists at 29.3 MW, and the island's diesel plant, 7.1 MW, is listed as standby. The outlines to the east are leases dated October 2013 that became South Fork, Revolution and Sunrise Wind.
Sources: Wikipedia, Cape Wind, Wikipedia, Block Island Wind Farm, Wikipedia, Revolution Wind, Wikipedia, Sunrise Wind
Moss Landing (2020–2026)
California's solar farms created a problem of their own. By the late 2010s they flooded the grid with power at midday and faded just as people came home and turned everything on, and the evening ramp grew steeper every spring. The state bet on batteries to carry the noon sun into the night, and the batteries serving its grid grew from less than 700 MW at the start of 2019 to more than 21,000 MW by the middle of 2026. Moss Landing showed how fast they could come, and what could go wrong. EIA's inventory counts 750 MW of Vistra batteries there by 2023, set in the shell of a retired steam plant, and PG&E put its own 182.5 MW Elkhorn battery on the same ground. The fire that broke out in Vistra's first 300 MW building on January 16, 2025 damaged more than half of the roughly 100,000 cells inside, and EIA now lists that battery as retired. PG&E took Elkhorn offline for inspection and plans to bring it back in July 2027. The damaged cells were still being removed when the building burned again on September 18, 2026, and nearby residents sheltered in place until the afternoon. Vistra's two newer batteries, 450 MW together, remain listed as operating.
On the map: The dot marks Moss Landing Power Plant, dated 1950. The map draws the plant's entry as gas, 1,470 MW, though its largest single unit is a battery. PG&E's Elkhorn battery, 182.5 MW from 2022, stands 350 m away and is listed as out of service.
Sources: CBS San Francisco, September 18, 2026, Canary Media, Moss Landing on fire again, California Energy Commission, August 7, 2026, EIA-860M
Gemini (2020–2024)
Gemini meets the evening problem by keeping the sun and the battery in the same place. It covers public land in the desert about 30 miles northeast of Las Vegas, and in May 2020 the Interior Department approved it as the largest solar project in the country's history. Primergy and Quinbrook built 690 MW of panels, 1.8 million of them, beside a 380 MW battery that holds about four hours of its full output, and the map's 1,070 MW counts both. The battery charges straight from the panels at midday and releases the power as the sun goes down, and when the last of the plant came online in July 2024 it could supply about a tenth of Nevada's peak demand. The desert here is home to the threatened Mojave desert tortoise, so the builders mowed the brush instead of scraping it away and let the rows of panels follow the natural contours of the ground. The Bureau of Land Management steers solar developers toward chosen tracts of federal land, the Solar Energy Zones drawn on this map in pale amber, and NV Energy's own Dry Lake plant stands inside the nearest of them. By the end of 2025, solar paired with batteries made up the largest share of the capacity waiting in the country's interconnection queues.
On the map: The ring is Gemini Solar Hybrid, 1,070 MW from 2024, the largest solar plant on the map. The pale amber is BLM's Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone, where NV Energy's Dry Lake Solar Energy Center, 250 MW from 2024, stands about 9 km to the southwest.
Sources: BLM, Interior approves plan for the largest solar project in US history, POWER, Gemini now fully operational, EIA-860M
Act IV · 2022–present
Traverse and the wind belt (2022)
Out on the southern plains the arithmetic that had defeated Putnam finally ran the other way. The wind there blows harder and steadier than almost anywhere else in the country, and as turbines grew taller and cheaper, utilities began to build wind farms because they made power for less than the fuel they saved. Oklahoma had about 5,200 MW of wind at the end of 2015 and about 7,500 MW two years later, second only to Texas. In 2017 American Electric Power's utilities in the region set out to buy Wind Catcher, 2,000 MW that Invenergy and GE were developing in the Oklahoma Panhandle with a long new line to carry its power east, and the plan ran into opposition and was dropped in July 2018. AEP came back with a design that needed no new line at all. Its utilities bought three wind farms in north central Oklahoma, 1,484 MW together, and the largest, Traverse, came online in April 2022 with 356 turbines. EIA calls it the largest wind farm built in one phase in North America. Texas regulators turned down the share meant for their state, so its power goes to customers in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. That year wind turbines made up 38 percent of Oklahoma's generating capacity, more than three times the share for the country as a whole.
On the map: The shading is the Global Wind Atlas's modeled wind speed at 100 m. The ring is Traverse, 999 MW of wind from 2022. Oklahoma has 71 wind plants the map lists as operating, about 14 GW, second only to Texas, and Kansas has 52, about 9.7 GW.
Sources: EIA, Today in Energy, November 21, 2022, Wikipedia, Wind power in Oklahoma, Wikipedia, Southwestern Electric Power Company
The Inflation Reduction Act and the queue (2022–2025)
On August 16, 2022 President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which put about $391 billion toward energy and climate, most of it through the tax code. It extended the credits for wind and solar for a decade and gave batteries a credit of their own for the first time. It added bonuses for projects built with American parts or in places that had lost coal and oil jobs, and it paid factories for the panels and turbine parts they made. Developers answered with a flood of requests to connect new plants, until the direction changed in 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025, ended the credits for wind and solar farms that did not begin construction within a year or come online by the end of 2027, while batteries kept theirs well into the next decade. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory measured the result in its 2026 report. At the end of 2025 the active queues held about 1,312 GW of generation and 749 GW of storage, a tenth less than a year before, with solar and wind requests each down 19 percent and gas up 86 percent. The line had shortened, and most of what waited in it was sunlight and wind, with batteries to carry their power into the evening.
On the map: Each ring is a request in an interconnection queue, drawn at its county, the largest first and the rest as you zoom in. The active requests add up to about 1,800 GW, storage included, more than the roughly 1,300 GW of every US plant the map lists as operating. About four in five of those gigawatts would be solar, wind or batteries.
Sources: Wikipedia, Inflation Reduction Act, Sidley Austin, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, July 2025, LBNL, Queued Up, 2026 Edition
Chokecherry and the wait for wires (2017–2026)
The queues were only one of the waits. The windiest places on the continent are mostly empty, and a wind farm there needs a long line to reach anyone who will buy its power. The billionaire Philip Anschutz, whose first fortune came from oil, began planning one around 2005 on the Overland Trail Ranch south of Rawlins, Wyoming, in old coal-mining country, on land so vast that the ranch straddles the Continental Divide. Its turbines were expected to run at close to half their rated output across a year. In 2008 his company took over TransWest Express, a proposed line of 728 miles that could carry 3,000 MW of direct current at 600 kV from Rawlins to the Marketplace substation near Boulder City, Nevada, and on toward California. The line won its federal approvals in December 2016 and January 2017, and construction of the wind farm began that same January. Its finish date has slipped since, from 2020 to 2026 and then to 2029, and EIA now lists its four phases, 3,550.5 MW in all, as due between 2031 and 2033. Lines across the Midwest met the same wait. The Grain Belt Express, meant to carry 4 GW of Kansas wind east to Indiana, was twice turned down by Missouri's regulators before the courts took up its case, and in 2025 the federal government canceled the $4.9 billion loan guarantee it had been offered the year before. By the 2020s the wind was waiting on the wires almost everywhere it blew strongest.
On the map: The ring is Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind in Wyoming, 3,550.5 MW under construction, the largest wind project on the map. MARKETPLACE, the 500 kV substation near Boulder City, Nevada, where its power is meant to arrive, is about 920 km away in a straight line, and the map draws no line between them yet.
Sources: Wikipedia, Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, Wikipedia, TransWest Express, Wikipedia, Philip Anschutz, Wikipedia, Wind power in Missouri, EIA-860M
Texas passes California (2024–2026)
Texas never needed a mandate for this part of the story. Its 1999 target was long behind it, and ERCOT's market pays whoever can deliver power most cheaply at each moment, which by the 2020s meant a solar farm at noon more often than not. Developers found that a battery could earn its keep in the same market by charging when power was cheap and selling when it was scarce, and Texas built them faster than anywhere else. The state passed California in utility-scale solar capacity during 2024, and in 2025 its solar farms generated 58,634 GWh to California's 53,713, the first full year Texas led, though California, with its rooftops, still makes more solar power in all. Of the 24 GW of batteries developers told EIA they planned to add across the country in 2026, more than half were in Texas. On July 22, 2026, as ERCOT's demand set an all-time record of 91,308 MW, its batteries set one of their own, 11,980 MW discharged at once. The grid operator now expects its peak to nearly double by 2032, driven by data centers and new industry, and the hours after sunset, when the solar fades and the batteries run down, have become the ones its planners worry about most.
On the map: Every dot is a solar or battery plant, the larger ones first. Texas has 241 solar plants the map lists as operating, about 36 GW, to California's 31 GW, and 223 plants the map draws as batteries, about 15 GW, to California's 9.2 GW. A battery inside a larger solar plant is counted with the solar.
Sources: Inside Climate News, March 5, 2026, EIA, Today in Energy, February 20, 2026, Texas Tribune, July 29, 2026
The New York Bight and New England (2022–2026)
New York set out in 2019 to put 9,000 MW of wind turbines off its coast by 2035, and in February 2022 the federal government auctioned six lease areas in the New York Bight, the waters between Long Island and New Jersey, for $4.37 billion, more than any offshore energy sale in its history, oil and gas included. The first big turbines were already rising farther east. South Fork Wind's twelve machines, about 30 miles east of Montauk Point, sent power ashore on December 6, 2023, and when they were finished that March they made the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the country. Vineyard Wind 1, fifteen miles south of Martha's Vineyard, delivered its first power four weeks after South Fork. Rising costs had already driven Ørsted to give up its two Ocean Wind projects off New Jersey, and in July 2024 a Vineyard Wind blade broke apart and scattered fiberglass onto the beaches of Nantucket. Then the federal government began stopping the work. The Interior Department halted Equinor's Empire Wind 1 on April 16, 2025 and let it resume that May, stopped Revolution Wind off Rhode Island that August with the project about 80 percent built, and on December 22 suspended five leases at once, citing national security. Federal judges let the builders go back to work in January 2026. On March 13 Revolution Wind began sending power to Rhode Island and Connecticut, and the last blades went up at Vineyard Wind the same day. Empire Wind 1 was more than 60 percent complete when its work resumed, and Equinor expects its first power by the end of 2026.
On the map: The ring is Empire Wind 1, 810 MW under construction for 2027, south of Long Island, and the six lease areas farther out in the Bight were sold in 2022. To the east the map lists Vineyard Wind 1, 800 MW, and South Fork Wind, 130 MW, as operating, and Sunrise Wind, 924 MW, as under construction.
Sources: Wikipedia, Offshore wind power in the United States, US Department of the Interior, February 25, 2022, Wikipedia, South Fork Wind Farm, Wikipedia, Empire Wind, Wikipedia, Vineyard Wind, Equinor, May 2025, Equinor, January 2, 2026, Connecticut Public, March 13, 2026, offshoreWIND.biz, January 16, 2026
Off Virginia Beach (2013–2027)
Dominion Energy set out to build its offshore wind farm itself, the only one in the country taken on by a utility rather than a private developer. It bought the federal lease off Virginia Beach for $1.6 million in a September 2013 auction, and in 2020 it raised two 6 MW test turbines at a cost of $300 million, paying for them itself once the federal grants it had counted on fell through. Virginia's lawmakers wrote offshore wind into the Virginia Clean Economy Act that year, calling for 5.2 GW of it by the end of 2035, and Dominion's plan grew to 176 turbines, 2.6 GW in all, enough for about 660,000 homes. Federal law keeps foreign ships from carrying cargo between American ports, and no American vessel could set turbines that large, so Dominion had its own built in Brownsville, Texas. Charybdis went to sea in April 2024, and that spring crews began driving monopiles into the seabed, standing down each winter while North Atlantic right whales traveled the coast. The December 2025 suspension caught this lease too. On March 23, 2026 the first turbine, in a lease area that begins 27 miles out, fed its 14.7 MW into an offshore substation, and by August thirty-one were standing, together about 450 MW. The company had pushed its finish to the end of 2027 by then, with the bill at about $11.65 billion.
On the map: The ring is Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, which the map lists at 2,640 MW under construction for 2027, operated by Dominion Energy. The project's 12 MW pilot, listed as operating, stands about 13 km to the west, and the outlines are federal lease areas.
Sources: Wikipedia, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Wikipedia, Merchant Marine Act of 1920, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, April 21, 2026, The Maritime Executive, August 3, 2026, offshoreWIND.biz, January 16, 2026
The bulk of new capacity (now)
Putnam's turbine made 1.25 MW on a Vermont hilltop and came down because it cost too much. Eighty-five years later the machines his book described, and the cells first shown at Murray Hill, are most of what the country builds. In 2024 wind and solar together made more of the nation's electricity than coal for the first time, 17 percent to 15. In 2025 the United States added 53 GW of generating capacity, the most in any year since 2002, and 27.2 GW of it was solar and a record 15 GW batteries. For 2026 developers told EIA they meant to add 86 GW, and 93 percent of it was solar, batteries or wind. None of it came easily. Tax credits lapsed and returned, the wires lagged behind the wind farms, a battery hall burned on Monterey Bay, and half-built turbines waited off Long Island while a court decided whether work could go on. Through all of it the price of a solar panel fell by more than ninety-nine percent from its level in 1976, and the lone prototype on Grandpa's Knob became tens of thousands of turbines across the plains. The wind, solar and battery plants on this map are what came of it, and most of the plants waiting in line to join them are more of the same.
On the map: The view runs from Tehachapi to Las Vegas, past three earlier stops, and holds 331 wind, solar and battery plants the map lists as operating, about 23 GW. Of the capacity at US plants listed as operating whose first unit dates from 2020 or later, about nine tenths is wind, solar or batteries.
Sources: Ember, US Electricity 2025, March 12, 2025, EIA, Today in Energy, February 20, 2026, Our World in Data, Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?