The Turbines Around North Palm Springs Are Quietly Being Replaced, One by One

Every windmill tour brochure describes the same scene: thousands of turbines spinning across the San Gorgonio Pass, a landscape that looks like it has always been exactly this way. If you live in North Palm Springs, you know that picture is already out of date. The wind farm outside your window has been under active reconstruction for years, and the version you're looking at right now is not the version that was there in 2019, or even 2022.

That distinction matters if you're the one driving past it every day. The turbines aren't just spinning. Some of them are being pulled down and replaced with machines nearly three times their size, and the pace of that swap has picked up in the past few years.

A Wind Farm That Doesn't Sit Still

The San Gorgonio Pass wind farm stretches from Cabazon down through North Palm Springs, and it has gone through a series of what the industry calls repowering projects, where older, smaller turbines get pulled and replaced with fewer, far more powerful ones. This isn't a single event. It's been rolling through in phases.

In 2020, the Desert Hot Springs Repower project took out 69 aging turbines and put up four large new machines in their place. A year later, Coachella Hills replaced 363 old, small turbines with 17 modern ones. In 2022, the Mountain View Repower removed 93 outdated machines and installed 16 new turbines rated between 3.6 and 4.3 megawatts. Then in 2023 and 2024, the Mesa Repower and Alta Mesa Repower projects combined to take out 620 aging turbines in the hills west of the Whitewater River and replace them with just thirteen new ones.

Read those numbers again. Hundreds of turbines coming down, replaced by a fraction as many. The new machines installed across these projects are Vestas V112 or V117 models, and the largest of them reaches 492 feet at the blade tip. If you've noticed the pass looking less cluttered but somehow more imposing in certain sections, that's not a trick of the light. That's the actual shape of the change.

Why the Turbine Count Depends on Who's Counting

Ask how many turbines are standing in the pass and the number you get depends entirely on when the person counting last looked. A tour write-up from 2020 put the figure around 2,100. An industry blog post from 2015 cited 2,174. The most recent count anyone has published, from a 2025 feature quoting wind energy historian Tom Spiglanin, who wrote the book "Backstories of the Palm Springs Windmills" and runs golf cart tours through the pass for $55, puts the number at roughly 650 legacy machines still standing.

None of those figures are wrong exactly. They're snapshots of an ongoing teardown and rebuild taken years apart. If your neighbor tells you there are two thousand turbines out there and someone else says it's closer to six hundred, you're both right, because you're likely counting different generations of machines at different points in the repowering timeline. The old Kenetech and Storm Master units from the 1980s wind rush are the ones disappearing. The Vestas machines going up in their place are fewer, but each one produces far more power than a dozen of the old ones combined.

For anyone who's lived in North Palm Springs long enough to remember what the pass looked like a decade ago, this is the honest version of the story: you're not misremembering a denser wind farm. It was denser. It's being deliberately thinned and upgraded at the same time.

The Market That Feeds the Techs, Not Just the Tour Buses

Drive Indian Canyon Drive far enough north and you'll hit Windmill Market & Produce, the small deli at 17080 North Indian Canyon that most visitors know as a date shake stop. The tour buses treat it as a novelty, a place to grab something sweet before continuing on to Joshua Tree or back down into downtown Palm Springs.

Residents know it differently. One longtime visitor described the market as a spot filled on weekdays with workers from the wind farm itself, people who spend their shifts among the turbines and stop in for a sandwich or a coffee between jobs. That detail changes what the market actually is. It's not primarily a tourist curiosity that happens to sit near the turbines. It's closer to a break room for the people who keep the wind farm running, a business whose weekday rhythm is set by shift changes at the repowering sites rather than by the tour bus schedule.

The market's own hours back this up. It's open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., shortens to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, and closes entirely on Sunday, which lines up with a workweek crowd rather than a weekend tourist crowd. The date shakes, made with real Medjool dates rather than the date-crystal shortcut some other stands use, are genuinely good. But the reason the place has stayed a fixture for decades has as much to do with who eats there on a Tuesday afternoon as with anything a passing visitor tastes once.

A Traffic Signal on the Same Corridor

North Indian Canyon Drive is the road that connects North Palm Springs to everything south of it, and the city has flagged safety work along that broader Indian Canyon corridor as part of its Local Road Safety Plan. Further south on that same road, at the Via Escuela intersection, the city has been installing a new traffic signal, with construction targeted for completion by September 2026 according to the city's capital improvement tracking.

It's a small, unglamorous project, the kind of thing that never makes a headline. But if you commute south on Indian Canyon Drive toward downtown, toward the airport, or toward anywhere else in the valley, it's the corridor you're already driving, and a signal going in anywhere along it is worth knowing about before you plan your next appointment or grocery run around it.

What This Adds Up To

None of these three things, the turbine repowering, the market's workday clientele, or a traffic signal miles down the road, would make headlines on their own. Put together, they describe something more useful than a postcard: a neighborhood whose defining feature, the wind farm, is not a fixed backdrop but an active industrial site being rebuilt in real time, and whose small businesses and infrastructure are shaped by that fact more than by the tourists who assume it's all scenery.

If you live under those turbines, you're watching an energy transition happen at eye level, turbine by turbine, faster than most residents realize until they try to count how many are actually still standing. That's a different way to understand the place than the version in a tour brochure, and it's the version that actually matches what you see out the window.

For those who know North Palm Springs from the inside, whether you've watched the repowering unfold for years or you're weighing what a home here means for your own plans down the road, Fine Homes By Michelle brings the same close attention to the Coachella Valley's changing communities that this stretch of Indian Canyon Drive deserves. Reach out to schedule a private consultation whenever the desert's next chapter becomes relevant to yours.