A wind power boom in the nation’s central corridor has been a financial windfall for some struggling rural areas. Coke County, Texas, which has a population of about 3,300, had the biggest increase in economic output of any county in the country between 2019 and 2021, according to a Stateline analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics. Coke County’s gross domestic product, or GDP, increased from $128 million to $235 million, or 83%. Including Coke County, seven of the top 10 counties with the largest GDP increases had significant recent wind farm construction, the analysis found. … Much of the wind farm construction is happening in the areas identified as high-wind from the Dakotas south to Oklahoma and Texas, including Kansas, Nebraska and neighboring states, as well as concentrations around Iowa and the Great Lakes. Texas leads all states with 18,315 turbines as of late 2022, according to the federal data on turbines analyzed by Stateline, followed by Iowa (6,205), California (5,981), Oklahoma (5,370) and Kansas (3,962).
Source: Pew
