USWTDB Wind Turbine Proximity Screener — Nearest by Coordinate

Screen any list of coordinates against the U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) — 77,379 land-based and offshore wind turbines (measured live 2026-08-01) maintained by the USGS, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and the American Clean Power Association. For every site you pass in, the actor returns the nearest wind turbine with full spec detail, how many turbines fall within your radius, the tallest and shortest nearby, total nameplate capacity in range, the neighbouring projects, and the FAA obstruction identifiers for the closest turbine — one clean, billable row per asset.

Answers, by coordinate: Is there a wind turbine near this site? How close? How tall? How many? Whose project? How much capacity? What is its FAA obstruction number?

What changed in v1.1 (2026-08-01)

v1.0 fetched turbines by state: it derived a state from the coordinate, downloaded that whole state, and measured distances only against it. Two things went wrong with that, both measured live.

1. A state line was a wall. At 35.00, -101.85 — the Texas panhandle, 8 miles south of the Oklahoma line — three USWTDB turbines sit within 5 miles, the nearest at 3.578 mi (WTAMU project, Texas). v1.0 reported:

turbine_count_within_radius: 0
turbines_present_flag:       false
nearest_distance_miles:      104.394
nearest_project:             "Goodwell"      <- in Oklahoma

A turbine 29x further away, in the wrong state, and a confident "no turbines nearby". The state was wrong too: the bounding-box lookup returned OK for a Texas coordinate, because the state boxes overlap and "smallest box wins" is not containment. With a radius of up to 100 miles, the same class of miss applied to every border site in the country.

2. A state with no turbines looked like an outage. Six of the states the actor recognised — AL, FL, GA, LA, SC and DC — contain zero USWTDB turbines. v1.0 treated "0 rows" as a source failure, fell through all three sources, and emitted a billable ERROR row reading all USWTDB sources failed or empty for state FL. An infrastructure error where the truth was a verified clear.

v1.1 queries by geometry. No state is involved, no border is a wall, and a source that answers with zero rows has answered. It also adds:

• a per-source outcome contract (source_used, arcgis_status, postgrest_status, csv_status, fallback_used) so you can tell a primary answer from a degraded one;
• live drift assertions run before any billable row — national turbine count in a measured band, the full required field set present, the -9999 unknown sentinel still in use, imagery freshness, a positive canary at Storm Lake IA, a cross-border canary in the Texas panhandle that must find the Texas turbine, and a known-clear negative control in central Florida. If any fails the run fails and nothing is billed;
• 56 new output fields from data USWTDB was already returning and v1.0 threw away.

No existing field was removed or renamed and the price is unchanged. nearest_distance_miles changed meaning by correction: it is now the distance to the nearest turbine anywhere (found by widening the search to 25 then 100 miles), not the nearest turbine in the site's state.

Who it's for

• Aviation / obstruction analysts — flag tall-structure and airspace exposure near heliports, airstrips, low-level routes and survey sites. nearest_total_height_m is tip height, and nearest_faa_obstruction_ors / nearest_faa_aeronautical_study_no hand you straight to the FAA DOF record.
• Radar, telecom & met-tower siting engineers — screen candidate sites for wind-turbine clutter before a detailed study; max_total_height_m_nearby and max_rotor_diameter_m_nearby size the problem.
• Real-estate, land & renewable due diligence — setback checks with turbine_count_within_half_mile and turbine_count_within_1_mile, viewshed/nuisance screening, Phase-I style reviews.
• Wind developers & asset managers — oldest_project_year_nearby, nearest_is_retrofit and nearest_project_capacity_mw are the repowering-candidate signals; nearest_eia_plant_id joins to EIA-860/923.
• AI agents & data pipelines — a chainable geospatial lookup that turns a coordinate into a structured turbine-proximity summary with an explicit per-source status, so an agent can tell "clear" from "unknown".

How it works

1. You supply assets — a list of {lat, lon, label} sites (state is accepted and echoed back, but no longer affects the result).
2. For each asset the actor issues a true geodesic radius query against the USGS ArcGIS FeatureServer, falling back to the USWTDB PostgREST API (bounding-box filtered) and then the national CSV download (downloaded once per run) if a source throws.
3. It measures the haversine distance to every returned turbine, keeps those inside radiusMiles — a real circle, not the query bounding box — and rolls the result into one row. If nothing is inside the radius, the search widens to 25 then 100 miles so nearest_distance_miles is still answered.

Example input

{
  "assets": [
    { "lat": 42.03, "lon": -95.02, "label": "Storm Lake wind area, IA" },
    { "lat": 35.0,  "lon": -101.85, "label": "Amarillo TX — 8 mi from the OK line" },
    { "lat": 41.118, "lon": -71.522, "label": "Block Island, RI (offshore)" },
    { "lat": 28.0,  "lon": -81.5,   "label": "Central Florida (verified clear)" }
  ],
  "radiusMiles": 10,
  "maxAssets": 500
}

Verified live results (build 1.1, 2026-08-01, 5 mi radius)

Site	Turbines in radius	Nearest	Nearest state	Project	Notes
35.00, -101.85 (TX panhandle)	3	3.578 mi	TX	WTAMU	v1.0 said 0 turbines / 104.394 mi / Oklahoma
42.03, -95.02 (Storm Lake IA)	0	5.132 mi	IA	Victory(Carroll)	nearest_within_radius: false, found by widening to 25 mi
41.118, -71.522 (Block Island RI)	5	0.230 mi	RI	Block Island	all 5 offshore, 30 MW, tip height 181.1 m
28.00, -81.50 (central Florida)	0	none within 100 mi	—	—	a verified clear with error: null; v1.0 emitted a billable outage row

Output fields (one row per asset)

The site

Field	Meaning
asset_label, asset_lat, asset_lon	Echo of the site you submitted.
asset_state_input	The 2-letter state you supplied, echoed back. Informational only in v1.1.
radius_miles	Radius used for the aggregation.

Nearest turbine

Field	Meaning
nearest_distance_miles	Distance to the closest turbine anywhere, not just in your state. Null when none exists within 100 miles.
nearest_within_radius	True when that turbine is inside your radius; false when it was found only by widening; null when none was found.
nearest_search_radius_miles	How far the search had to widen (your radius, then 25, then 100).
nearest_case_id	USWTDB case_id — the stable per-turbine identifier.
nearest_project	Project / wind-farm name (p_name).
nearest_manufacturer / nearest_model	Make and model (t_manu, t_model).
nearest_state / nearest_county / nearest_county_fips	Where the turbine actually is — it can differ from the site's state.
nearest_total_height_m	Total (tip) height, metres (t_ttlh).
nearest_hub_height_m	Hub height, metres (t_hh).
nearest_rotor_diameter_m / nearest_rotor_swept_area_m2	Rotor geometry (t_rd, t_rsa).
nearest_capacity_kw	Nameplate capacity of that turbine, kW (t_cap).
nearest_project_year	Year the project became operational (p_year).
nearest_project_turbine_count / nearest_project_capacity_mw	Size of the whole neighbouring facility (p_tnum, p_cap).
nearest_is_offshore	True when the turbine is offshore (t_offshore).
nearest_is_retrofit / nearest_retrofit_year	Whether it has been repowered, and when.
nearest_faa_obstruction_ors	FAA Obstruction Evaluation number (faa_ors) — the key into the FAA DOF.
nearest_faa_aeronautical_study_no	FAA aeronautical study number (faa_asn).
nearest_eia_plant_id	EIA plant identifier — joins to EIA-860/EIA-923.
nearest_location_confidence / nearest_attribute_confidence	USWTDB confidence 1–3 in the coordinate and in the spec attribution.
nearest_image_date / nearest_image_source	The imagery USWTDB used to verify the turbine's position.

Within the radius

Field	Meaning
turbine_count_within_radius	Turbines inside the radius.
turbine_count_within_half_mile / turbine_count_within_1_mile	Setback-scale close-in counts.
turbines_present_flag	True when at least one turbine falls inside the radius.
total_capacity_mw_nearby	Sum of nameplate capacity in range (MW). A lower bound when turbines_with_unknown_capacity_nearby is non-zero.
mean_capacity_kw_nearby	Mean nameplate capacity over turbines whose capacity is recorded.
max_total_height_m_nearby / min_total_height_m_nearby / mean_total_height_m_nearby	Tip-height range in the radius.
max_hub_height_m_nearby / max_rotor_diameter_m_nearby	Largest hub height and rotor in the radius.
newest_project_year_nearby / oldest_project_year_nearby	Vintage spread — the repowering signal.
projects_within_radius / project_names_within_radius	How many distinct projects, and which.
manufacturers_within_radius	Distinct manufacturers present.
states_within_radius / counties_within_radius	Where the in-radius turbines sit. More than one state means your radius crosses a line — which v1.0 could not see.
offshore_turbines_within_radius / retrofit_turbines_within_radius	Offshore and repowered counts.
turbines_with_unknown_height_nearby / turbines_with_unknown_capacity_nearby	Coverage: how many in-radius turbines USWTDB publishes no height / capacity for. They are still counted; only their unknown attributes are omitted from the statistics.
low_location_confidence_turbines_nearby	In-radius turbines whose coordinate confidence is 2 or lower.

Provenance and per-source outcome

Field	Meaning
source_used	Which USWTDB source answered: arcgis, postgrest or csv.
arcgis_status / arcgis_error	Outcome of the primary query: ok, unavailable, not_attempted.
postgrest_status / postgrest_error	Outcome of the PostgREST fallback.
csv_status / csv_error	Outcome of the national CSV fallback.
sources_failed	How many sources threw before one answered.
fallback_used	True when a fallback answered instead of the primary; null when no source answered at all.
result_truncated	True when a source still had more records after the page cap.
data_vintage_latest_image_date	Newest imagery date in the whole layer at run time — how current USWTDB is.
error	Null on a screened row; a message when a site could not be screened.
source_url / checked_at	Endpoint used and ISO run timestamp.
disclaimer	Scope statement — a proximity screen, not an FAA determination.

Reliability

• null means "not checked". false means "checked and negative". A source that answers with zero turbines has answered, and you get a verified clear with error: null and sources_failed: 0. If every source fails for an asset you get an ERROR row with every verdict null, and if every asset fails the run fails and nothing is billed.
• The -9999 and "missing" unknown sentinels never reach your row. They become null, are excluded from every max/sum/mean, and the count of turbines with unknown specs is reported so you can see the coverage. Zero MW means zero turbines; unknown capacity means null.
• Live drift assertions run before any row is emitted and every measured value is logged. Set skipDriftChecks: true to skip the ~10 extra requests on very large batches; you then accept results from an unverified upstream.

Verified populating inputs. The four prefilled coordinates are chosen so a default run exercises every column: Storm Lake IA (a widened nearest search, FAA IDs, EIA plant ID, retrofit year), the Texas panhandle (the cross-border case, and turbines with unknown height/model), Block Island RI (offshore, close-in ring counts, full specs) and central Florida (a verified clear). The first entry also carries "state": "IA" to show that a v1.0-style input is still accepted and echoed as asset_state_input without changing the answer. On that run the only null columns are error and the three per-source *_error fields — populated only by a failure, and each pinned by an offline fixture.

Use as an MCP tool

This actor is a clean, chainable tool for AI agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) via mcp.apify.com. Every output field has a schema description, so an agent can call it with a coordinate and reason directly over turbine_count_within_radius, nearest_distance_miles, nearest_within_radius and sources_failed — including telling a verified clear apart from an unverified one.

FAQ

Is there a wind turbine near this coordinate? Pass the lat/lon and read nearest_distance_miles, nearest_within_radius and turbines_present_flag.

How current is the data? USWTDB is quarterly-updated by USGS/LBNL/ACP and lags new installations by roughly one quarter. data_vintage_latest_image_date reports the newest imagery date in the layer on every run. Turbine points are visually verified from aerial imagery to ~10 m; some specs carry make/model uncertainty, which nearest_attribute_confidence quantifies.

Do I need an API key? No. USWTDB is public-domain and keyless.

What radius should I use? Default is 10 miles. Use a smaller radius for tight obstruction/setback checks or a larger one for regional density screening (max 100 mi).

Why do I still get a nearest_* value when the count is 0? The count only includes turbines inside your radius; the nearest turbine is still reported by widening the search to 25 then 100 miles. nearest_within_radius: false tells you it is outside your radius, and nearest_search_radius_miles tells you how far out it was found.

Do I need to supply state? No. v1.1 searches geographically. state is accepted for backward compatibility and echoed back as asset_state_input, but it does not affect the result.

What if my site is in a state with no wind turbines? You get a normal row with turbine_count_within_radius: 0, turbines_present_flag: false, sources_failed: 0 and error: null — a verified clear. Six states (AL, FL, GA, LA, SC and DC) have no USWTDB turbines at all.

Is this an official FAA/obstruction determination? No. This is a screening aid over USWTDB data, not an FAA obstruction evaluation, a radar-interference study, a legal setback ruling, or a repowering feasibility analysis. nearest_faa_obstruction_ors is provided so you can go look up the authoritative record.

Related screeners

• HIFLD Grid Proximity Screener — transmission lines, substations and generating plants near a site.
• BOEM Offshore Wind Lease Tracker — federal offshore wind lease areas and planning areas.
• FAA Drone Airspace Checker — Part 107 airspace class and LAANC availability by coordinate.
• Wild & Scenic River Proximity Screener — designated Wild & Scenic Rivers and the WSR Act Section 7 flag.
• Site Due Diligence Bundle — 20 federal overlays for one coordinate in a single call.

Pricing

Pay-per-result: one billed row per screened asset. A verified no-turbine site still returns a row. A run in which every asset failed is failed outright and bills nothing.

Data source & citation

U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) — USGS, LBNL, and the American Clean Power Association. https://eerscmap.usgs.gov/uswtdb/ · DOI: 10.5066/F7TX3DN0