The state of Texas is the wind capital of the United States. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) recently released their annual wind capacity report and Texas leads the U.S. with a capacity of 4,446 megawatts. California is a distant second with 2,439 megawatts of wind capacity.

California also lead in capacity added in 2007 with 1,618 megawatts. Colorado was second with an added wind capacity of 776 megawatts in 2007. The state of Iowa took the crown for largest percentage of electricity generated from wind at 5.5%.

It may surprise some that California is not even close to Texas in these metrics. After all, the state of California has been very aggressive in support of renewable energy over the last decade. We must consider topographical and infrastructure issues though.

A considerable amount of the land mass in California is occupied by mountainous regions that are very unfriendly to the sighting of wind farms. Texas, on the other hand, is mostly flat.

California is also running into transmission bottlenecks. They would like to site even more wind but in order to do so they need more power lines to deliver the energy from the desert (where much of California’s wind capacity resides) to the  population centers.  Texas will be running into the same problem very soon.

Solving the transmission bottleneck issue will be expensive for both states. ERCOT, the Texas electric market operator just filed a report that assesses the wind related infrastructure costs in Texas to be between $2.95 and $5.75 billion dollars.

AWEA 2008 Annual Rankings Report