Riverside County Near-Ground Wind Resources

Wind Harvest could add 3.65 GW of wind energy to the San Gorgonio Pass

One of the biggest and most legendary wind resource areas in California is the San Gorgonio Pass. Some of the first wind turbines in the state were installed here in the early 1980s. It quickly grew to hold over 600 MW of wind turbines but has had no significant increases in capacity in decades. Yet beneath and around the existing turbines blows one of the world’s best wind resources, all beneath 100 feet above ground level.

Wind Harvest used Underwriters Laboratories’ Windnavigator data to, for the first time ever, map out the near-ground wind resources in the Pass. The analysis shows that 3,650 MW of wind turbines could be installed underneath the current propeller-type turbines in the existing wind farms in the 48 square miles of desert. With turbines like Wind Harvesters, the area could add 11,310,000 MWh of energy output per year to the ~2,700,000 MWh of wind energy produced there now.

This report used the estimated wind speeds at 66 ft (20m) above the ground at 860 locations across the resource area. Most astounding is how strong the wind is near the ground through the bottom of the pass. Wind Harvest could install over 888 MWs of Wind Harvesters in the 6.7 square miles where the near-ground wind speed averages 17mph (7.75m/s), which is more than the ~600MWs installed in the entire pass now.

Wind Harvester Generation

If fully built out, 48 square miles of land can support 52,150 Wind Harvester sized turbines, each rated at 70kW, 3,600 MW of total capacity. This buildout assumes that rows of near-ground turbines are placed approximately ~230 ft apart with 5 turbines per 312 ft in each row.

Based on the wind speed in each of the zones indicated on the map above, this number of turbines with the power performance characteristics of Wind Harvesters would produce 11,300,000 MWh of electricity per year. The breakdown of energy generation by wind speed area can be found in the table below.

The image above shows a subset of the 860 data points used in this analysis. The wind speeds shown were taken at 66 ft above ground level and are shown in m/s.