TGS Wind Pathfinder

Wind Power Density (WPD) is a measure of the energy available from wind at a given location. It takes into account both Wind Velocity (wind speed) and Air density. It's expressed in watts/m² rather than kph or m per second. This map presents high wind power areas in purple and red, and low wind power areas in blue.

This particular WPD grid represents the average wind power at 100m above ground (or sea level)- a typical height representative of modern wind turbines.

This wind power density map is sourced form the  Global Wind Atlas , where other wind power density maps provide views of different heights to suit different turbine specifications.

Take a tour round some of the results of interesting relationships between topography and wind direction by clicking the locations below:

 High wind channelled between the Alps and Pyrenees 

 High winds offshore Britain and the North Sea associated with the Gulf Stream's long fetch across the Atlantic 

 High terrain induced local variation between Washington and Pittsburgh 

 Return to overview 

Completed offshore wind farm projects are focused primarily in Europe, particularly the North Sea. Offshore capacity in Europe (incl. UK) in 2020 was around 25GW; but governments have set ambitious targets to increase that to 100GW by 2030.

In this map  active offshore windfarms are shown in yellow ,  Submitted applications  in pink (including those awarded by The Crown Estate on February 8th as part of lease round 4).  Planned future offshore windfarm areas are shown in dark blue . ( return to overview )

Completed projects can be differentiated, as  each wind turbine location in Europe has been collected  using remote sensing methodologies and are represented on the map. (scroll in to view these in detail)

The distribution of onshore wind projects (each represented by a bubble here, large projects have larger bubbles) shows both the expected trend of a many onshore wind projects in the developed of  Europe  and  North America - but also several clusters of projects in  South America ,  Asia  and even  Africa . This layer is based on a dataset from the  World Resources Institute .

In the US, these windfarm project locations have been supplemented with individual turbine locations for  each onshore wind turbine  in the US, (from the US Wind Turbine Database)

Explore this and more in the  TGS Wind Pathfinder app