National Renewable Energy Laboratory Releases Major Update to Wind Energy Dataset

May 8, 2018

The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory announced that a massive amount of wind data was recently made accessible online, greatly expanding the amount of information available on wind flow across the continental United States. The data enable anyone considering building a wind plant, or even erecting a single turbine, to understand how strong breezes tend to blow across a particular area and how energy from the wind can be integrated into the electrical grid.

Funded by the Energy Department's Wind Energy Technologies Office and originally released in 2015, the Wind Integration National Dataset—also known as the WIND Toolkit—made 2 terabytes of information available, covering about 120,000 locations identified using technical and economic considerations. The new release contains 50 terabytes, covers more than 4,700,000 locations, and extends 50 nautical miles offshore.