Originally published December 20, 2010. Updated September 28, 2026.

Wind turbines supplied about 10% of the electricity the US generated in 2025, 464 billion kilowatt-hours worth. Divide that by the 10,791 kilowatt-hours an average US household used in 2022 and you get power for roughly 43 million homes. Wood Mackenzie projected more than 7 gigawatts of new US wind capacity for 2025, and a new federal law now puts a hard deadline on the tax credit that helped build the industry this far.

Wind supplies about one in ten kilowatt-hours nationwide

If your utility draws off the national grid, about one in ten kilowatt-hours generated in 2025 came from wind, a total of 464 billion kilowatt-hours nationwide.

Add in utility-scale solar and the combined share reaches 17% of what utilities generated in 2025, or 19% once rooftop solar counts too. Rooftop panels make up nearly all of that two-point gap, since wind has no comparable small-scale category in EIA’s count. If you’ve got panels on your own roof, they sit inside that second number. If you don’t, your power is coming out of the larger utility-scale pool.

Wind generation grew 3% from 2024 to 2025, a much slower pace than solar’s 34% jump the same year. Twenty years earlier, the two combined made up under 1% of US generation. Wind now reaches 43 states with utility-scale wind farms as of 2025.

Texas leads a short list of wind-heavy states

Texas generates more wind power than any other state, by a wide margin. Together with Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Illinois, it produced about 52% of all the wind electricity generated in the US in 2025.

If you live in one of those five states, wind is doing more work on your local grid than the 10% national average suggests. Do the math on EIA’s 43-state count and 52% figure above, and the other 38 states divide up what’s left.

“Utility-scale” is the qualifier doing the work in these numbers. It covers large turbine arrays feeding electricity into the shared grid, not a single turbine on one farm or backyard.

New wind capacity keeps coming through 2029

Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, or ACP, project developers installed more than 7 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2025, about 36% more than in 2024. Their forecast keeps that pace up, with 10.7 gigawatts expected in 2026 and 12.7 gigawatts in 2027, the strongest year in their outlook.

The same forecast puts total US wind additions at 46 gigawatts from 2025 through 2029, averaging more than 9 gigawatts a year. None of that gigawatt count shows up on your bill directly. What counts is a wind farm’s capacity factor, how much of its rated output reaches the grid over a full year, since the same blades spin hard through a windy spring and barely turn on a still August afternoon.

Wind’s build-out hasn’t always gone to plan. A 2008 mega-project planned for the Texas Panhandle collapsed when the transmission lines it needed were never built, NBC News reported.

The wind tax credit races a 2026 construction deadline

The 2025 tax law, formally the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, set a hard deadline for the wind credit. Wind projects have to begin construction within 12 months of the law’s enactment, or by roughly July 4, 2026, to avoid a strict December 31, 2027 placed-in-service deadline. If a wind project breaks ground near your town before then, this is the deadline it’s racing. Miss both dates and a project doesn’t qualify for the credit at all.

The IRS also eliminated the old 5% safe harbor for wind projects in guidance issued in August 2025. A developer can no longer claim it started construction by spending 5% of a project’s cost alone.

The rule now requires “physical work of significant nature”, actual work on the ground, like pouring foundations or setting anchor bolts. For a project that hasn’t broken ground yet, that’s a narrower path to qualifying than developers had before. “Placed in service” is the separate milestone that starts the credit’s clock, the point a project starts delivering power commercially.

A second rule limits where turbine parts can come from

A separate rule layers on top of the construction deadline. Wind projects that start construction after 2025 face a foreign entity of concern cost-ratio test, or FEOC test, starting at 40% in 2026 and rising to 60% after 2029. FEOC is the law’s term for suppliers based in countries the US treats as restricted, and the test caps how much of a project’s material cost can trace back to them.

ACP objected to how the rules were written in August 2025, arguing that Treasury’s phase-out schedule moves faster than the one-year phase-out Congress wrote into the law. However that dispute settles, developers are financing projects now against a compressed construction timeline and a shrinking list of eligible suppliers.

US growth sits inside a record year worldwide

The world added 165 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2025, 40% more than in 2024, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. Those are capacity additions, a measure of potential output, so they don’t convert directly into the US generation-share percentages above.

Almost all of the new capacity was onshore, 155.3 gigawatts against 9.3 gigawatts offshore, so offshore wind is still a small share of the annual build even in a record year. Cumulative wind capacity worldwide now stands at 1,299 gigawatts, built across 57 countries that installed new turbines in 2025, out of 138 countries with any wind capacity at all. China led that 2025 surge in installations.

Why 2027 decides how much new wind gets built

Most of what happens next is already on the calendar. Wood Mackenzie and ACP project wind installations peaking at 12.7 gigawatts in 2027, the same year the placed-in-service deadline catches any project that didn’t start construction by July 4, 2026.

Whether developers hit that 46-gigawatt, five-year total depends on how many projects clear the IRS’s physical-work standard and the rising FEOC cost-ratio test before then. ACP argues Treasury’s schedule moves faster than the one-year phase-out Congress wrote into the law, a dispute it raised in August 2025 that still hasn’t settled.

None of that changes the 10% of the grid wind already supplies. It decides how much of that forecast gets built.