Wind Resource Areas (2023)

The method to create the Wind Resource Area datasets is to:

Query Power Plant point locations from the California Energy Commission, California Power Plants data set by operational status and capacity greater than or equal to 2 MW at each facility from the Quarterly Fuel and Energy Report, CEC-1304A. Plants tracked include those of at least 1 MW, which are considered of commercial size.  A polygon was generated around the resulting operational, commercial wind facilities using the Aggregate Points geoprocessing tool with an aggregation distance of 15 survey miles. A 5 mile spatial buffer was added to the resulting polygons.  The buffer does not represent information regarding environmental analysis.  It is used only to depict plant concentration regions.