By Ritesh Gupta

The US Geological Survey (USGS) has come up with a new tool to support smart landscape-level planning decisions that support domestic energy production while minimising conflicts, said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.

The data will help improve the siting of future wind energy projects as well as aid land managers in devising more up-to-date land-use and multiple-use plans.

The wind turbine map, which includes turbines installed as of July last year, was created by combining publicly available data sets from the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as other federal, state and local sources.

USGS researchers also identified additional turbines not in those pre-existing databases and added them to the dataset and map.