GRID · FIELD GUIDE
Where the World's Wind Power Is — and Why the Map Looks the Way It Does
Wind farms are going up faster than any other kind of power plant on Earth — but where actually are they, how big is a 'big' one, why are the record-holders all offshore, and why does a worldwide map of them look as though Europe has most of the world's wind when China has far more?
Wind is the fastest-growing way the world makes electricity, and this layer maps where it has actually landed: roughly 11,000 wind farms, each drawn as a turbine sized by how much power it can produce. Switch it on and the pattern jumps out — dense across northern Europe, scattered through the American plains, ringed around coastlines — with the giants standing offshore in the North Sea.
A farm, not a turbine
The unit here is the farm: a cluster of turbines run as one plant. That's a deliberate choice. The underlying map holds hundreds of thousands of individual turbines, far too many to draw and not very informative — a single turbine tells you little, while a farm tells you where a real chunk of generation sits. The biggest farms gather hundreds of machines and feed a city; the smallest are a few turbines on a ridge. Sizing each by capacity lets the map show that range at a glance, from a 5 MW community project to a multi-gigawatt offshore array.
Onshore and offshore
Most farms by count are onshore — cheaper, quicker, spread across windy land. But the record-holders are all offshore, where the wind is stronger and steadier and the turbines can be vast. The North Sea is the world capital of big offshore wind: Britain's Hornsea and Dogger Bank arrays alone run to several gigawatts. Offshore is harder and dearer to build, which is why it's newer and still clustered in a few shallow, wealthy seas — but it scales in a way onshore sites rarely do.
Read the map carefully
The most important thing to know is what the map isn't. It shows where wind farms are mapped, and OpenStreetMap is mapped most thoroughly in Europe — so the picture leans heavily European even though China has far more wind than anywhere else, with India not far behind. The data is honest about its own gaps: capacity is missing on about a fifth of farms, and those are drawn smallest rather than invented; a handful of aggregated "wind bases" and obvious mis-tags are kept out of the records list. What you're seeing is the publicly mapped fleet — a real and useful slice of the world's wind, but a slice shaped by where volunteers have done the mapping.
Wind farms are only half the renewables story. The other half is the grid built to move their power — the long-distance transmission lines and HVDC links that carry electricity from windy coasts and plains to the cities that use it. Turn those on alongside this layer and you can see the two build-outs as what they are: one system.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a 'wind farm' — and how is it different from a single turbine?
A wind farm is a cluster of turbines run together as one power plant, sharing a connection into the grid. A single modern onshore turbine is roughly 3–6 megawatts (MW); a farm gathers anywhere from a handful to several hundred of them. That distinction matters for a map: OpenStreetMap holds over 460,000 individual turbines worldwide, which is far too many to draw at world scale and wouldn't tell you much anyway — a forest of identical dots. So this layer maps the roughly 11,000 wind farms instead: each one a real plant, placed where the farm is and sized by how much power it can produce. It's the 'where is wind power' view rather than the 'where is every blade' view.
Why are the biggest wind farms all offshore?
Out at sea the wind is stronger and steadier, there are no neighbours to object to noise or sightlines, and you can install much larger turbines — offshore machines now reach 14–15 MW each, more than double a typical onshore one — because you don't have to truck the blades down roads. Put those together and offshore farms scale to a size onshore sites rarely reach. The record-holders are almost all in the North Sea: Britain's Hornsea and Dogger Bank arrays run past 1–3 gigawatts each, enough for millions of homes. The trade-off is cost and difficulty — foundations in the seabed, cables to shore, maintenance by boat — which is why offshore is newer and still concentrated in a few wealthy, shallow-shelf seas.
Why does the map look so Europe-heavy when China is the world's biggest wind market?
Because the map shows where wind farms are mapped, not where they are. The data comes from OpenStreetMap, a volunteer project, and Europe is mapped far more completely than anywhere else — so about 70% of the farms shown here sit in Europe. In the real world that's badly misleading: China has by far the most installed wind capacity on Earth and India is in the top five, but both are thinly tagged as wind plants in OSM, so they look much smaller here than they truly are. This is the single most important caveat on the layer, and it applies to every OpenStreetMap-based map: the shape of the data is the shape of the mapping effort, not the shape of the world.
How big is a wind farm — what do the sizes on the map mean?
Each turbine on the map is sized by the farm's capacity in megawatts, the maximum power it can produce when the wind is good. The median mapped farm is around 20 MW — a small local cluster — while the giants run to thousands. Capacity is tagged on about 81% of farms; the ones without a capacity tag are drawn at the smallest size rather than given a made-up number. The sizes use a square-root scale and a cap, so a single mis-tagged entry can't balloon into an absurd glyph, and the genuinely huge offshore arrays still read clearly as the biggest things on the map. One wrinkle: a few entries in the data are aggregated 'wind bases' — China's Gansu base is tagged as a single ~10 GW plant when it's really hundreds of farms — so the 'biggest farms' list holds those out to stay honest about what a single farm is.
Why does wind power need so much grid?
Two reasons, both visible on this canvas. First, location: the best wind is often far from the cities that need the power — out at sea, or across windy interior plains — so it leans on long-distance transmission, and increasingly on HVDC links, to get to demand. Switch on the Transmission and HVDC layers and you can see the lines built to carry it. Second, intermittency: wind doesn't blow on schedule, so a grid with a lot of wind needs strong interconnection to share power across regions when the wind is calm in one place and blowing in another, plus storage and flexible backup. That's why the wind build-out and the grid build-out happen together — the farms are only half the story, and the lines that move their power are the other half.
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