Texas led a four-fold growth in wind turbine installations in the U.S. last year, with 1,100 megawatts of new wind farms going into service across the state and 4,850 megawatts across the country.
Developers were moving quickly to take advantage of the federal Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) before it expired, said the American Wind Energy Association.
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“The U.S. now has more than 65 gigawatts of wind power capacity, second only to China’s 96 gigawatts,” Bloomberg reports. “At year-end there was more than 12,700 megawatts of capacity under construction, the majority in Texas.”
“We don’t think we need the PTC forever,” but “we don’t want the industry to go off the cliff again,” said AWEA CEO Tom Kiernan. “We want to figure out a responsible policy going forward to extend the PTC for as long as possible.”
