relates to a low number of data points—but not so low as to make the use of a regression relationship questionable. A total of 472 wind plants are kept for the final analysis, and their locations are shown in Figure \[Map\_Sel\]. Because obtaining an accurate representation of wind data in complex terrain by reanalysis products is challenging [@shravan2009comparision], most of the selected wind plants are located in the Midwest and Southern Plains. Notably, no wind plants in California pass the filtering criteria because they are predominately located in areas with thermally driven wind regimes, such as Tehachapi Pass, where coarse-resolution reanalysis products are poor predictors of wind energy production.

The fundamental step in an AEP calculation involves a regression between density-corrected wind speed (here, from the reanalysis products) and energy production (here, from the EIA 923 database). To investigate whether a simple linear function can be assumed to express the relationship between density-corrected wind speed and wind plant energy production when considering monthly data, we show a scatterplot between MERRA-2 density-corrected monthly wind speed and monthly energy production across all 472 sites in Figure \[linear\_reg\]. For each site, data have been normalized by the respective site mean. We show best-fits 