EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ex post analysis of economic impacts from wind power development in U.S. counties

Jason Brown, John Pender (jpender@ers.usda.gov), Ryan Wiser, Eric Lantz and Ben Hoen

Energy Economics, 2012, vol. 34, issue 6, 1743-1754

Abstract: Wind power development has surged in recent years in the United States. Policymakers and economic development practitioners to date have typically relied upon project-level case studies or modeled input–output estimates to assess the economic development impacts from wind power, often focusing on potential local, state-wide, or national employment or earnings impacts. Building on this literature, we conduct an ex post econometric analysis of the county-level economic development impacts of wind power installations from 2000 through 2008 in a large, wind-rich region in the country. Taking into account factors influencing wind turbine location, we find an aggregate increase in county-level personal income and employment of approximately $11,000 and 0.5 jobs per megawatt of wind power capacity installed over the sample period of 2000 to 2008. These estimates appear broadly consistent with modeled input–output results, and translate to a median increase in total county personal income and employment of 0.2% and 0.4% for counties with installed wind power over the same period.

Keywords: Wind power; Economic development; Ex post analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q20 Q42 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (62)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988312001466
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:34:y:2012:i:6:p:1743-1754

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2012.07.010

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:34:y:2012:i:6:p:1743-1754