When people talk about land usage for wind, they normally include the entire clear area of land around each turbine. Nobody is claiming a huge wind farm techni

When people talk about land usage for wind, they normally include the entire clear area of land around each turbine. Nobody is claiming a huge wind farm technically has a tiny footprint because only the base of each tower touches the ground. The US if fucking huge, seeing “as far as the eye can see” is only about 28 sq miles, even if we assume we’re looking for wind turbines only (so can see 100m tall turbines with their bases over the horizon), you’re looking at 1500 sq miles. The U.S. is 3.5 million square miles. That’s three orders of magnitude greater than the area with wind turbines are far as the eye can see in every direction covers. Or put another way, if you stood in the middle of a wind farm filled with the worlds largest onshore wind turbine stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see, that would be a land area about equivalent to 0.042% of the U.S. I don’t think there are wind farms even remotely close to that size. Another way of looking at that number, is wind turbines evenly distributed across the US, so that a turbine as always just visible over the horizon from anywhere, would only consume 0.042% of the U.S. So yeah, it would be very hard to visualise show just how little land the U.S. wind turbines currently cover.