How much of the time are wind turbines producing electricity?
Depending on the wind resource available at a particular site, wind turbines produce electricity for about 80-85% of the year on average. Sometimes the “capacity factor” is talked about: this relates to the energy produced over a year. If a wind turbine has a capacity factor of 30% then it produces 30% of the amount of energy it could have produced if it was working flat out all through the year. The capacity factor is a function of variations in wind speed rather than the efficiency of the wind turbines.
