2026 study Urban-rural

Where rural ends for a 640 ft turbine

Before you run every constraint, one number tells you where turbines cannot go. Above -- structures per km2 the home setbacks eat every acre. Prospecting can start with this single screen and only run the full stack on what survives.

Threshold, under 1 percent left--

Built turbines below it--

Turbine land left, of counties--

Median cell at zero above--

Cells with none left--

Chinook buildable, of its AOI--

Views

Built turbines: nearest USWTDB project per state, plus Amazon US East.

Ordinance

Setback--

Tip height--

Setback from homes--

Lost vs 2x tip--

Road setback, 1.1x tip (--)

By 2030, GHSL projection

Cells moving up a settlement class--

Turbine land in them--

Cells leaving rural--

Chinook nacelles

Stand in a nacelle, 113 m up

Settlement class filter

2020 classes 2030 classes

Very low density ruralLow density ruralRural clusterSuburbanSemi-dense urbanDense urbanUrban center

GHSL 2030 is a 1 km model projection; it flags cells, it does not count future houses.

Assumptions and method

Setbacks come from Chinook, a generated demo layout on Armondo Energies, a fictitious developer: 18 Vestas V163-4.5, 113 m hub, 194.5 m tip, on Sand Mountain, DeKalb County. Structures, roads, the settlement grid and the built turbines are public data.

The Chinook layers are not in this build, so the nacelle and the setback ring are off.

Assumed: every FEMA structure is a home, as Chinook Rev 1 does; footprints carry no residence class.
Assumed: distance is measured from the footprint edge on a 10 m grid, so a setback is good to about 7 m.
Presets: building setbacks run 2.0x tip at the national median, 3x at the 75th percentile and 5x at the 90th, across 372 counties (NREL, Sergi, May 8, 2025, slide 10).
What these counties have: the NREL 2025 ordinance file lists state local acts for DeKalb (2015), Cherokee and Etowah (2014): 2,500 ft from a turbine to any adjacent property line, 40 dBA at that line, no home setback; Jackson and Marshall have no entry. Parcels are not in this build, so the 2,500 ft line is not applied. The file was compiled with an LLM and cites the introduced bills; validate before relying on it.
Ordinances keep piling up: 888 state and local restrictions on wind and solar in 48 states by the end of 2025, and 30 of Ohio's 88 counties ban them (Sabin Center 2026 edition, via pv magazine, Sept 8, 2026). A Marion County, Kansas planning commission backed a 500 ft height cap (Jan 30, 2026, not verified).
5x tip is 3,190 ft and the stored distances stop at 3,000 ft, so 5x counts the land past 3,000 ft and overstates what is left.
Water inside a land cell counts as land beyond the setback. Cells with under 0.5 km2 inside the five counties are drawn but left out of the numbers.
Turbine land here is the setback alone. Chinook's 7.6 percent also takes out slope, wetlands, roads and parcels.
Built turbines: structures per km2 in the 1 km GHSL cell holding each USWTDB turbine, from the same footprint table; the 3 x 3 block around it is in the hover text. Their cells use the home setback only, no road setback.

Footprints and roads are rasterized at 10 m in Albers and a distance transform gives every pixel its distance to the nearest footprint and road. Per GHSL cell the build stores pixel counts by distance in 100 ft bins to 3,000 ft, so every setback is an exact sum at bin edges. The random curve is exp(-density x setback disc area); the fit is exp(-k x density) by least squares, and the threshold is where the fit leaves 1 percent of a cell. The zero line is the first 5 per km2 bin whose median cell has no land left.

Loading the cells

--per km2 Above this many structures, turbine land is gone --

Loading the built turbines

--

Turbine land left in each 1 km cell

none 11050125247 ac

Built turbine, USWTDB Moves up a settlement class by 2030 Cell in focus Pinned cell Inside 1,276 ft of a home Chinook buildable, 1,286 ac Chinook AOI FEMA structure

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