About 4,000 - and Yes, They Work

Roughly 4,000 turbines stand in the San Gorgonio Pass - one of America’s first commercial wind farms and still one of its best-known, largely because Interstate 10 drives every Coachella Valley visitor straight through the middle of it.

Why the count keeps shrinking

Here’s the counterintuitive part: the number falls almost every year, and the power rises. A wind turbine works about 20–25 years, and the pass is deep into its second and third generations - clusters of small 1980s machines come down, and single modern giants topping 400 feet go up in their place, each producing many times what the whole retired cluster did. So if the forest of towers looks thinner than an old postcard, that’s the upgrade, not the decline.

Do they actually work?

All the ones spinning do - this is a working power plant, not a monument, feeding California’s grid whenever the pass blows, which is most days. One honest note from the tour’s own reviews: a visitor called the narration “a bit promotional for wind energy,” and that’s fair warning about the tone - but the machines themselves don’t need the sales pitch. Standing under one settles the question better than any brochure: how the visits work.