Originally published December 20, 2010. Updated July 14, 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 American household uses in a year and you get power for roughly 43 million homes. Wind and solar together made up less than 1% of US generation in 2005, and the buildout hasn’t stopped. Wood Mackenzie projected more than 7 gigawatts of new US wind capacity for 2025, even as the tax credit that helped build the industry runs into a new deadline.
How much of the country’s electricity comes from wind right now
Wind supplied about 10% of US electricity generation in 2025, a total of 464 billion kilowatt-hours. That’s a nationwide average spread across the whole grid, a useful way to picture the scale of what wind contributes overall. Wind and utility-scale solar combined made up 17% of what utilities generated in 2025, or 19% once rooftop solar is added in. That two-point gap is almost entirely rooftop panels, since wind doesn’t have a comparable small-scale category in EIA’s count. Twenty years earlier, that combined share was under 1%. Wind generation itself grew 3% from 2024 to 2025, a much slower pace than solar’s 34% jump over the same year, so solar is doing more of the work of growing that combined share lately. Wind still supplies about one in every ten kilowatt-hours on the grid, generated across 43 states with utility-scale wind farms as of 2025.
Texas leads a short list of wind-heavy states
Texas produces more wind power than any other state, by a wide margin. Together with Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Illinois, it accounts for about 52% of all the wind electricity generated in the US in 2025. That’s more than half the country’s wind output concentrated in five states, out of the 43 states that have utility-scale wind farms at all. Run the subtraction and the other 38 states are splitting the remaining 48% between them. That current lead sits on top of a rockier history. T. Boone Pickens’s plan for what would have been the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle fell apart because the transmission lines needed to move that power to market were never built, NBC News reported. The project’s first phase, a planned 1,000 megawatts, had been slated to go online before 2011 before it was canceled. “Utility-scale” is the qualifier doing the work in the numbers above. It means the large turbine arrays that feed electricity into the shared grid, not a single turbine bolted onto one farm or backyard.
New wind capacity keeps coming through 2029
Wood Mackenzie, an energy research firm, and the American Clean Power Association, the wind industry’s trade group, jointly project that US developers installed more than 7 gigawatts of new wind capacity in 2025, about 36% more than in 2024. Their forecast has that pace continuing, with 10.7 gigawatts expected in 2026 and 12.7 gigawatts in 2027, the strongest year in their outlook. Add it up and the same forecast puts total US wind additions at 46 gigawatts from 2025 through 2029, averaging more than 9 gigawatts a year. A gigawatt of installed capacity isn’t the same thing as a gigawatt of electricity delivered to the grid, though. How much of a wind farm’s rated output shows up in the generation totals over a year is its capacity factor, a separate number from how many turbines get built. A farm rated at 1 gigawatt of capacity generates well under that number in an average hour across a full year.
The wind production tax credit has a hard deadline now
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. 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, so a developer can’t claim it started construction by spending 5% of a project’s cost alone anymore. 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 much narrower path to qualifying than developers had under the old rules. “Placed in service” is the separate milestone that starts the clock on the credit itself, the point when a project is delivering power commercially.
A second rule limits where turbine parts can come from
A separate set of rules layers on top of the construction deadline. Wind projects that start construction after 2025 face a foreign entity of concern cost-ratio test, starting at 40% in 2026 and rising to 60% after 2029. FEOC is short for foreign entity of concern, 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. The American Clean Power Association objected to how the rules were written in August 2025, arguing that Treasury’s accelerated phase-out guidance goes further than the one-year phase-out Congress wrote into the law. However that dispute settles, developers are now financing projects 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 generation-share percentages earlier in this piece. 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. Put the year’s additions next to that cumulative total and 2025 alone accounts for roughly an eighth of every wind turbine ever installed on the planet. China led that 2025 surge in installations.
What would change this answer next
What happens next is mostly already on the calendar. Wind installations are projected to peak at 12.7 gigawatts in 2027, the same year the tax law’s placed-in-service deadline catches any project that didn’t start construction by July 4, 2026. Whether the 46-gigawatt, five-year total developers are forecasting gets built depends on how many projects clear the IRS’s physical-work-of-significant-nature standard and the rising foreign entity of concern cost-ratio thresholds before then, the same rules the American Clean Power Association objected to in August 2025. The next two years of IRS filings and interconnection queues will show how many of today’s projects make it to the grid before that window closes. A slower rollout than the forecast wouldn’t erase the 10% of the grid wind already supplies, but it would slow how fast that share keeps climbing from here.
