Wind power, especially in places where it’s abundant, provides some of the world’s cheapest electricity. While on the face of it, a wind turbine connected to a generator might seem like a rather straightforward piece of technology, it’s been a technical headache, stumping engineers across NASA and the US defense primes, for much longer than it’s been generating cheap electricity.

High winds, moving mechanical parts, and high capital costs, all placed in the context of a wild and turbulent energy market, have made wind’s rise to become the second largest source of renewable energy on Earth a rather dramatic story.

Today, wind energy supplies over 2,000 TWh of electricity to the globe, accounting for 7.8% of global energy production. However, wind power continues posing challenges to grid operators as the share of electricity generated by the intermittent resource grows. In addition, scaling wind turbine generating capacity continues to be a tricky technical problem. 

Wind power has traditionally been a boom-and-bust business — booming in times when energy prices soar, and going bust they fall. As alternatives like solar experience plummeting production costs, and base power solutions like nuclear or geothermal are finding new opportunities for resurgence, it’s an open question as to whether wind will continue to boom in the near term, and what its role will be in the global production of energy over the long term.

Wind Energy Today

The global build out of wind power has been nothing short of stunning. In 2000, the total amount of electricity generated by wind was 52 TWhs, but by 2024 that number had exploded to 2,300 TWhs. Wind is now the second largest source of renewable energy after hydropower, and it’s still gaining speed. In 2024, wind became Britain’s biggest source of electricity, and it has already been supplying more than half of Denmark’s electricity for more than five years.

As of 2024, wind accounts for 10% of US energy generation, comprising a larger share in states like Texas, where the wind resource is particularly great. Over a third of the world’s wind generating capacity, however, is located in China whose expansive wind farms collectively generate 886 TWh annually.

Source: Atlantic Council

Wind power has been gaining ground particularly because the levelized cost of onshore wind energy is the lowest of all generating technologies today. Levelized cost is a measure used to assess the average total cost of building and operating a power generation asset over its lifetime. Between 2010 and 2020, the levelized cost of wind energy fell by more than 50% while the cost of land-based wind turbines fell by 50% between 2008 and 2020. 

The increasingly low cost of wind has been achieved entirely on the back of technical innovations that have been decades in the making, from more aerodynamic blades that allow wind turbines to achieve greater conversion efficiency to greater capacity sizes, resulting from taller, larger turbines that can now generate more than 3MW per single turbine. Spreading installation costs across greater generating capacity has been the prime contributor to wind power’s rapid cost declines.

However, as wind farms have blanketed the United States’ windiest areas, the question has become where wind can expand to next, and how much that will cost. While some anticipate that even taller towers can help turbines reach winds in higher altitudes, allowing wind generation to be performed even in non-traditionally windy sights, the real fascination lies with the winds that blow offshore. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that America’s offshore wind resource can generate more than 13,500 TWh of electricity annually — three times America’s annual consumption of electricity.

Though offshore wind farms have been around since the 1990s, primarily in Europe, they are extremely new to the United States. The first commercial-scale offshore wind farm was only fully commuted in March 2024, off the coast of New York. However, by all accounts, more is likely to come. The Biden administration has announced the intention to develop 30GW of offshore generating capacity by 2030 and has approved wind projects like the one off the coast of Virginia, large enough to provide power for 900,000 homes. While pursuing an offshore buildout of this scale is an impressive feat on its own, and a testament to America’s willingness to flex some industrial muscle, it remains to be seen if this approach is economically prudent as the levelized cost of offshore wind energy, in contrast to onshore wind, is one of the highest.

In order for offshore wind buildouts to work, generous government subsidies have been required. Even still, the smallest changes in the cost basis, whether from supply chain issues or a higher cost of capital, can suddenly make offshore wind projects economically unviable. In 2023, for example, a number of proposed offshore projects in the US experienced a cascade of cancellations.

Wind power gained initial traction following the oil embargo of 1973 when oil prices quadrupled and nations reliant on OPEC began scrambling to find reliable domestic sources of power. However, following a drop in oil prices during the mid-eighties, these worries dissolved and programs devoted to subsidizing renewable energies like wind dried out once again. 

History may repeat itself again. In February 2024, the Harvard Business Review published an article arguing that recent forays into offshore wind resemble the hasty oil rush of Pennsylvania in the 1850s, which after just a few years left 8,800 ghost wells scattered across the state. Large-scale wind projects come with similar risks.

Just as wind power itself is intermittent, so too is its economic viability. As other renewable energy sources like solar or clean baseload projects like geothermal and nuclear take off — it’s an open question what the role wind energy will play in the future.

The First Wind Turbine

The first wind turbine popped up about fifty years after Michael Faraday discovered that electricity could be induced with an electromotive force. If you spin a magnet around a conducting material, you will generate an electric current. This insight kicked off the electric era, as privately owned electric generating plants cropped up to supply power to urban homes and offices. However, getting electricity out to rural areas would prove a challenge as transmission lines weren’t yet capable of transmitting electricity efficiently over long distances. If you wanted your farm to have electric light, you would need to generate it yourself.

That’s exactly what James Blyth, a Scottish university professor, did in 1887. He took inspiration from windmills that had covered the landscape of Europe for centuries, converting the wind’s kinetic energy into mechanical power that could pump water or spin mills. Instead of this, Blyth’s windmill would turn the wind’s power into electricity. He built a 33-foot windshaft, at the top of which he attached four arms of canvas sails that spun and powered a dynamo. 

Source: BBC

His construction produced enough electricity to light not only his own cottage but the entire main street in his town of Marykirk. Though Blyth’s invention produced surplus electricity for 25 years, surrounding villagers declined to use the power it produced. At the time, electricity was still considered a mysterious, dangerous force that many considered “the work of the devil.”

Remarkably, in the winter of the same year, another inventor was building a wind turbine of his own. Charles Brush, an American engineer and philanthropist attached a DC generator to a traditional windmill design to provide electric power for his mansion and home-laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. The wind turbine stood in Brush’s backyard and could generate enough power to supply 350 incandescent lamps, two arc lamps, and three motors.

Source: Cleveland

While these newly developed wind turbines gestured at a future where electricity could be generated from nature’s free resources, they had a couple of important drawbacks, the most significant of which was that they simply didn’t generate enough power. They might have been an appropriate small-scale solution for an eccentric engineer or millionaire, but they didn’t stand a chance to achieve commercial scale against coal-powered generators, like Edison’s New York Pearl Street power plant. In contrast to these wind-powered dynamos, Edison’s plant could light not just a few hundred lamps, but 10,000 lamps across hundreds of households. Before wind turbines could extract the full power of wind energy, a number of innovations would need to take place. 

Improving Turbine Efficiency

The original windmills of Europe were built to produce as much torque as possible. Slower rotating arms meant more rotational force could be produced, making the mill more effective at grinding down grain or sawing wood. The goal with wind turbines where the rotors were connected directly to the dynamos was exactly the opposite. Here, the object was to get the blades to spin faster since higher rotational speeds allowed the generator to produce more electric power. As a side note, today’s turbine rotors spin slower, generating torque which then is converted into high rotational speeds via a gearbox. 

Ultimately, it would fall on innovations that occurred in aeronautics to help deliver some of the biggest innovations in wind turbine design, particularly in the aftermath of World War I. Propeller blades were so effective at delivering faster rotational speeds that in some cases new wind turbines were built simply by strapping the propellers directly to generators. Propeller blades were far superior to the cloth blades common to traditional windmills. They had an airfoil shape, which allowed them to generate more lift, meaning that rotational speed could be generated just on account of its aerodynamic shape. Adding a twist to the length of the blade turned out to deliver even more lift, as the angle of the blade cutting into the wind could be optimized along its length.

Source: Department of Energy

These design improvements, born of the early 20th century, were enough to increase the tip-speed ratio — the rotational speed of the blades, given the speed of wind — by three times over the 19th-century turbine designs of Brush and others. This improvement translated directly into greater power output. 

Around this time, the German physicist Albert Betz, derived his “Betz Limit,” a figure that determined the maximum power that could be extracted from the wind by a turbine. It turned out, the absolute maximum that could be harnessed was 59.3% of the wind’s kinetic energy. While wind turbines built in the 19th century could extract around 15% of the wind’s power, the turbines of the 20th century bumped that number up to more than 40%. 

The Boom and Bust Cycles of Wind Energy

There was one company in particular that capitalized on the innovations that poured into the wind industry: the Jacobs Wind Electric Company. Two Montana-based brothers, Marcellus and Joseph Jacobs, decided to build a wind turbine on their farm, which previously relied on gasoline generators for electricity. Refueling would cost them a three-day journey to the nearest town, so they opted to see if they could generate electricity from the wind.

The Jacobs brothers ultimately arrived at a three-blade turbine model, not unlike the kind commonly built today, and the product took small-town America by storm. What started with their neighbors asking them to install turbines on their lots ended up growing into a thriving business which, by the time the company ceased operations in 1956, had distributed 20,000 units all across the United States.

Source: Sam-Diane

Wind became the heart of a small, but growing movement of decentralized energy generation in America. However, this would soon come to an end as centralized power provision finally made its way across the country. The Rural Electrification Administration was inaugurated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in 1936 to bring grid power to rural areas once and for all. However, as Brandon Owens notes in his excellent The Wind Power Story, “as a precondition for transmission interconnection, farms with wind turbines were required to destroy them.” 

If that didn’t spell the end of wind power in America on its own, the crash in energy prices during the Great Depression would have turned most households away from the far more experimental wind turbines, anyway. Furthermore, the wind turbines could still only generate a very modest amount of electricity. The Jacobs models, for instance, could produce 3kW at maximum. Producing more power would require larger turbines, but engineering huge turbines that were resilient to strong winds proved a challenge in itself, a challenge America would become intimately familiar with during its first energy crisis.

The crisis came in 1973 when OPEC’s oil embargo on the United States, prompted by America’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, sent oil prices through the roof. After decades of falling coal and petroleum prices, this was a sudden and drastic reversal. By the end of 1973, oil prices had quadrupled. Oil prices remained structurally high for the next decade, and in response, federal agencies like the Energy Research and Development Administration and NASA sprang into gear to see if they could finally develop utility-scale turbines. 

For over a decade starting in 1975, NASA worked with primes like Lockheed, Westinghouse, and General Electric to develop increasingly larger models of wind turbines. They were successful in erecting the world’s first 2MW turbine, called MOD-1, in 1979. However, nearly everything about the construction proved unfeasible, from its exorbitant $30 million cost to the electricity fluctuations the turbine seemed to be causing when connected to the local grid. Those fluctuations proved so disruptive that the turbine had to be turned off during prime-time television.

Source: Nara Public Domain

MOD-1’s life came to an end after only 130 total hours of operation when a number of studs sheared off. The cost of repairs was far too high for NASA, so they auctioned off the entire thing for $50,000 just three years after it was built. NASA continued trying to build bigger, more ambitious models in the following years, but all of the designs were basically unreproducible one-offs and rather unreliable.

While building bigger turbines proved far more challenging than anticipated, the other approach of building clusters of smaller-capacity wind turbines came to be seen as the more favorable path forward. With the passage of a number of tax incentives and credits for renewable energy developments in the late 1970s, the construction of wind farms began in earnest. California’s Altamont Pass was one of the first large-scale wind farms, which could collectively generate 630MW across 6,700 100kW wind turbines. By 1985, Altamont Pass was producing half of the world’s wind energy. But even these more modest turbines faced reliability issues, as turbines would break down and blades fall off.

Source: Wind Power Monthly

A significant scale up in turbine size would only start in earnest in the 1990s when the introduction of new materials like fiberglass and carbon fiber allowed for the production of lighter and more flexible blades. Gone were the hefty steel, aluminum blades. The Danish company Vestas, a pioneer in wind turbine technology, managed to decrease the weight of its blades from 3,800 kilograms down to 1,100 kilograms by switching to the new materials. From then on, everything from the hub height to the blade length, and maximum power capacity have grown steadily.

By 2023, the average height of wind turbines had nearly doubled since 1998, with the tallest now standing at over 200 meters. Meanwhile, the maximum power output had nearly quadrupled from then. Whereas in the late 1970s, NASA struggled to produce a turbine capable of reliably producing more than 2MW of power, as of 2023, the average wind turbine in the United States had a nameplate capacity of 3.4 MW.

Is Offshore Wind the Future?

As wind turbine technology has improved, allowing us to finally be able to economically take advantage of nature’s free energetic resources, a central question with wind generation has been where to build wind farms. Whereas there are a number of great onshore locations around the world, from the plains of the United States to the fields of China, some of the best locations for wind generation are offshore.

Placing wind turbines just a few miles away from the shore allows access to faster, more persistent winds. Of course, doing so requires the installation of wind turbines sturdy enough such that they can withstand and benefit from the strong winds, remain reliable in the saline maritime environment, and require limited maintenance, as getting technicians out there can be challenging and expensive. Moreover, building offshore foundations is a difficult and costly technical feat in itself, as is laying the transmission cable.

Still, the scale of the wind resource in offshore locations has been too tempting to pass up, particularly in places like England where offshore wind is actually closer to urban centers than the next-best land-based wind resource. As a result, offshore wind installations have grown far faster than land-based installations in the past decade — though they started with a smaller base. This has pushed the biggest wind turbine manufacturers, like GE, Siemens Gamesa, and Vestas, to develop ever larger turbines to take advantage of the opportunity.

Today, the average offshore turbine can generate more than 10MW. GE’s Halide-X turbine is considered one of the world’s largest, with a capacity of 14MW. It stands at 260 meters tall, nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and has blades that span just over 100 meters, extending its total height even further. One Halide-X turbine alone can power thousands of homes.

Source: Composites World

There is clearly an ambition to move far beyond just 14WM capacity. In 2017, ARPA-E funded a study into a 50MW turbine. However, the exact details of the scope and scale of such a machine are still unclear.

Another technical innovation in the world of offshore wind has been the development of floating wind turbines, which are not fixed to a foundation and can be deployed in even deeper waters. This is actually where the majority of the United States’ wind resources can be found. Of course, ensuring that thin structures as tall as the Eiffel Tower stay upright in rough waters is an incredibly challenging technical feat. While the Netherlands and Norway were the first countries to deploy floating turbines tens of kilometers away from shore in 2007 and 2009 respectively, the United States has yet to build out any of its own. However, in 2022, the Department of Energy launched an Energy Earthshot initiative to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind resources by 75%.

While offshore wind farms have been around since the first one was built by Denmark in 1991, they are relatively new to the United States. The first commercial-scale offshore farm was only fully commuted in March 2024. It’s a 12-turbine complex off the coast of Rhode Island capable of generating 132MW, enough to power over 70,000 homes in the New York area. By all accounts, there’s more where that came from as there are now an additional 60 offshore wind projects in development across the United States. 

Source: Electrical Contractor Magazine

In 2021, the Biden administration set a goal of developing 30 GW of offshore wind energy by 2030. And, if it’s going to happen in the next six years, the US will need to assemble and erect 2,100 turbines, lay 6,800 miles of undersea transmission cable, and hire a workforce of tens of thousands to do it. In short, this massive operation will require the creation of an entirely new supply chain, something already in the works after the Inflation Reduction Act invested $6.8 billion in the build-out of offshore wind manufacturing facilities and other suppliers. 

By 2023, however, the buildout of offshore wind energy looked increasingly like just another chapter in the wind industry’s boom and bust saga. Higher than anticipated costs led BP and Equinox to cancel their planned offshore projects off the coast of New York, and Danish Ørsted to cancel its project by New Jersey. On top of this, critics have noted the unreliability of offshore turbines, saying that maintenance costs can be expected to soar as turbines break down. Excitement was further dampened when GE announced in April 2024 that it would be scrapping its development of an 18MW turbine, preferring to concentrate its focus on its smaller models going forward. The move led directly to the cancellation of three more planned offshore projects in New York.

Wind energy has always had a reputation for its logistical and technical complexity. The story is no different today as the turbines get ever bigger, and their placement gets ever more exotic.

However, even land-based wind has room for technical improvements. Taller towers can allow turbines access to higher altitude winds, possibly making wind energy feasible in geographies where it previously wasn’t. New manufacturing practices, like additive manufacturing, could allow towers to be assembled in situ, eliminating the difficulties associated with transporting large components over great distances.

Geographies around the world have already benefited immensely from the lower costs and energy resilience offered by wind generation. The key moving forward will likely be leaning into increasingly economical and proven technologies, rather imprudently pushing wind out on a limb.