U.S. Wind Turbine Database

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The Wind Turbine Database is United States wide dataset of wind turbines [w:en:wind turbine] produced by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the American Clean Power Association. This dataset provides the location of land-based and offshore wind turbines along with turbine technical specifications. The dataset is update quarterly. It does not contain residential wind turbines. The dataset is free and in the public domain. We thank the USGS for their efforts to compile and make available the wind turbine database. Please note that while the geolocation of the wind turbines appears to be very good, some of the projects are missing information. Before importing any of this data, make sure to add the missing information that is needed in OpenStreetMap. All of the current wind turbines in the database use generator:type=horizontal_axis.

For more information describing the methods and quality control validation efforts check out this article continuously updated, geospatially rectified database of utility-scale wind turbines in the United States published by Nature Research

Citation

Hoen, B.D., Diffendorfer, J.E., Rand, J.T., Kramer, L.A., Garrity, C.P., and Hunt, H.E., 2018, United States Wind Turbine Database (ver. 3.3, January 14, 2021): U.S. Geological Survey, American Wind Energy Association, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data release, Wind Turbine Database.

Getting the data

The data is available at US Wind Turbine data. Either the shapefile or geojson includes a spreadsheet with a description of the field headers. For example, p_name is the Project Name field. The data includes information on over 67,000 wind turbines in 44 states plus Puerto Rico and Guam as of the fourth quarter 2020. Detailed memo and codebook (data dictionary), updated with each quarterly release, found at Wind Turbine Database Files

Improving Data

Geolocation

While most of the nodes are properly geolocated some are not, especially those with the tag t_conf_loc of none, or 1. These need improving before any attempt to import.

Missing Data

Some of the data is either missing or with a low confidence in its accuracy. Missing data can often be found by searching for the information.

Relations

It is recommended to use a relation for each of the wind turbine farms. The relation should include the name and power output. Below is a table with the appropriate tags for the Wind Farm. Also consider adding any wikipedia article, wikidata tag, and operator.

Wind Farm Relation

Key	Value
name	Name of wind farm
power	plant
plant:source	wind
plant:output:electricity	x KW/x MW
type	site
site	wind_farm
start_date	start date

USGS to OSM Tags

Field	OSM Tag	Description	Comments
case id	not used	unique uswtdb id
t_state	not used	state where turbine is located
t_country	not used	country where turbine is located
t_fips	not used	sate and county fips where turbine is located
p_name	name	project name	relationship name
p_year	start_date	year project became operational
p_tnum	not needed	number of turbines in project
p_cap	plant:output:electricity	project capacity (MW)	Part of relationship
t_manu	manufacturer	turbine original equipment manufacturer
t_model	model	turbine model
t_cap	generator:output:electricity	turbine capacity (KW)
t_hh	height:hub	turbine hub height (meters)
t_rd	rotor:diameter	turbine rotor diameter (meters)
t_rsa	rotor:swept_area	turbine rotor swept area (meters^2)
t_ttlh	height	turbine total height - calculated (meters)
retrofit	not used	indicator of whether the turbine has been partially retrofitted after initial construction
retrofit_year	not used	year in which turbine was retrofitted
t_conf_atr	not used as tag	turbine characteristic confidence (0-3) 0=not verified, 1=low, 2=partial, 3=full
t_conf_loc	not used as tag	location confidence (0-3) 0=not verified, 1=low, 2=partial, 3=full
t_img_date	not used	date of image used to visually verify turbine location
t_img_srce	not used	source of image used to visually verify turbine location
xlong	not used	longitude
ylat	not used	latitude