Wind farms, or more correctly wind power plants, are arrays of multiple wind turbines. The number of wind turbines in the array varies from no more than two or three in a small cluster to the thousands of machines in California’s windy passes.

Though it may seem a feature of the modern landscape, the use of multiple wind turbines to perform a task is nothing new. Only by tapping the power of multiple windmills could Jan Leeghwater (literally the “empty water” Jan), and the engineers that followed him, drain the polders and make the Netherlands what it is today. The Dutch called these early wind farms gangs of windmills and a group can still be seen southeast of Rotterdam at Kinderdijk. This water pumping wind plant was in use until the 1950s.

There were nearly one-quarter million wind turbines operating worldwide in 2015, representing more than 400,000 MW of generating capacity. These wind turbines produced more than 800 Terawatt-hours (800 TWh or 800,000,000,000 kWh) of electricity annually. There are far more now–so many that I no longer try to keep track of them.

Wind plants now scan the globe from a fjord in Denmark to the deserts of Southern California, from the polders of the Netherlands to the shores of the Arabian Sea, from the rugged Tehachapi Mountains to the moors of Britain’s Pennines.

Here are some of the wind farms and wind turbines photographed over the years. Most of the photos are now of historical interest. Many were taken in the 1980s and 1990s before the advent of digital cameras so the exact dates are now lost in the fog of time. Photos from this period have been scanned at high resolution from slide film.