The Local Economic Impact of Wind Power Deployment

This study focuses on the local economic impacts of wind power deployment. Wind power deployment is not necessarily driven by locally accruing economic payoffs only, but potentially also by other factors, such as emphasis on environmentally friendly energy production and its associated benefits. Thus, the local economic impacts of wind power deployment are ambiguous. We empirically test the existence of such impacts using German county-level panel data. After controlling for a set of observable and unobservable factors, the results show that wind power installation does not have a statistically significant impact on GDP per capita. The findings suggest that local economic impacts alone cannot explain the observed increase in wind power capacity.