Wind Power Price Trends in the United States

For the fourth year in a row, the United States led the world in adding new wind power capacity in 2008, and also surpassed Germany to take the lead in terms of cumulative installed wind capacity. The rapid growth of wind power in the U.S. over the past decade (Figure 1) has been driven by a combination of increasingly supportive policies (including the Federal production tax credit (PTC) and a growing number of state renewables portfolio standards), uncertainty over the future fuel costs and environmental liabilities of natural gas and coal-fired power plants, and wind's competitive position among generation resources. This article focuses on just the last of these drivers - i.e., trends in U.S. wind power prices - over the period of strong capacity growth since 1998.