Impact of Wind Development on County-Level Income and Employment: A Review of Methods and an Empirical Analysis (Fact Sheet)

To gain an understanding of the long-term county-level impacts from a large sample of wind power projects and to understand the potential significance of methodological criticisms, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and NREL recently joined efforts to complete a first-of-its-kind study that quantifies the annual impact on county-level personal income resulting from wind power installations in nearly 130 counties across 12 states. The results of this study, as well as a comparison with the prior county-level estimates generated from input-output models, are summarized here