Big dreams for renewable energy often goad people into imagining big wind projects, with hundreds of turbines.  But lots of smaller projects are just as likely to add up to big numbers.

Counting wind projects from 1999-2010 (based on data from LBNL’s excellent Wind Technologies Market report) the average size of an American wind project is 80 megawatts (MW).  The size of projects has risen in the past decade, from about 50-60 MW, but largely because the average turbine size in U.S. wind projects has nearly doubled to 1.79 MW in that time period.

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Interestingly, the most economical wind projects are between 5 and 20 megawatts.

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