$Since the early 2000s, wind power has been a substantial fraction of new electricity capacity in the US. In 2020 wind power was 42% of new electricity$

Construction Physics

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2022-09-21 20:30:17

Since the early 2000s, wind power has been a substantial fraction of new electricity capacity in the US. In 2020 wind power was 42% of new electricity generation capacity, and in 2021 it was 32%.

This is also true around the world. In Europe, wind power has been the first or second largest source of new generation capacity since at least 2015:

Likewise, in China wind power was the second largest source of new capacity in 2020. China currently leads the world in installed wind energy capacity:

Since the 1980s, the cost of wind-generated electricity has steadily fallen, to the point where it’s now one of the cheapest forms of electricity:

However, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to 1980 there was close to zero electricity generated from wind worldwide [0].

This is perhaps somewhat surprising in retrospect - unlike, say, nuclear energy or solar photovoltaics, the basic technology for wind-generated electricity (a windmill and an electric generator) has been in place since the 1800s. So why did it take over 100 years to start deploying it on a large-scale? Let’s take a look.