2010Jan26: The U.S. wind industry installed a record 9,900 MW of new generating capacity in 2009, a 39% increase in wind generation capacity compared to the year before (New York Times). “The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow. We need to set hard targets, in the form of a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), in order to provide the necessary stability for manufacturers to expand their U.S. operations and to seize the historic opportunity we have today to build up a thriving renewable energy industry” (AWEA).
Reference: AWEA http://www.awea.org/newsroom/releases/01-26-10_AWEA_Q4_and_Year-End_Report_Release.html#_edn1; New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/business/energy-environment/26wind.html
Read the White House Press Release – The Winds of Recovery are Blowing Across the Nation http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/26/winds-recovery-are-blowing-across-nation
Image Description: Map shows installed megawatts (MW) for each U.S. state. Top states in terms of total wind power capacities: Texas (9,410), Iowa (3,670), California (2,794), Washington (1,980), Minnesota (1,809). Image Location: AWEA http://www.awea.org/projects/ Image Permission: This work is copyrighted and unlicensed. However, it is believed that the use of this work to illustrate the subject in question, Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information, on Interlinked Challenges, hosted on servers in the United States by Michigan State University, qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.