January 13, 2024
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
 

Iowa is a very red state. It’s also a clean-energy powerhouse

Wind turbines are seen at sunset in Williamsburg, Iowa, on August 14, 2023.    Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

As Iowa Republicans gather across the state Monday evening in the bitter cold to caucus for their preferred GOP candidate, much of the electricity for their lights and heat may be coming from a surprising source: thousands of wind turbines that dot the heartland landscape.

Iowa is a deeply red state, and recent polling averages show a lot of love for the Republican primary frontrunner, former President Donald Trump. But the state stands apart from other GOP strongholds in a climate-friendly respect — it makes and uses far more clean energy than many blue states.

Iowa has been a wind energy behemoth for decades. Those spinning turbines powered 62% of Iowa’s electricity in 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration. It’s the second-largest producer of wind power in the country behind Texas, and it consumes the most wind power in the nation.

In a state dominated by agriculture, many view wind energy as another commodity, said Kerri Johannsen, the energy program director for the Iowa Environmental Council. Wind turbines are spinning throughout some of the state’s reddest areas, where many farmers lease their land to utilities — continuing to farm that land after the turbines are constructed.

“The thing about Iowa is it’s really windy here,” Johannsen told CNN. “We know we can be a powerhouse for the rest of the Midwest.”

The pursuit of wind energy in the state has long been a bipartisan one; longtime Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has been nicknamed the “father” of Iowa wind, and has pursued tax subsidies for the clean energy. But the issue became controversial on the national stage as Trump elevated conspiracy theories about turbines causing cancer and offshore windmills causing whales to go “crazy” and die in “in numbers never seen before.”

Unlike in past years, wind energy hasn’t come up much in the 2024 Republican race for president, Iowa experts and clean energy advocates said. Speaking at a CNN debate in Iowa on Wednesday, candidates Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley both promised to repeal President Joe Biden’s generous tax credits for wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy, as well as electric vehicles. Doing so could hurt continued buildout of wind and solar in Iowa and other states.

“I don’t see (wind) coming up much at all because it’s tied in with climate change and they don’t want to go there,” Peter Thorne, a University of Iowa professor of environmental health and member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, told CNN.

Thorne believes most Iowans view wind energy “as a positive.”

“We grow stuff,” Thorne added. “Anything we can do locally to sustain ourselves is viewed positively; I think that’s just the nature of agricultural states.”

Making money from the wind
Iowa’s foray into wind energy began when it became the first state to pass a renewable energy standard in 1983, requiring its utilities to generate a certain amount of clean electricity.

That bipartisan push, combined with the state’s bountiful wind — strongest in its western half — created a clean energy industry in the country’s heartland. Since then, thousands of turbines have been erected.

For many farmers, leasing their land to utilities for wind turbines has become a source of stable income, even as crop yields fluctuate from year to year in what can be “a very volatile business,” said Iowa Farmers Union board president Aaron Heley Lehman.

“Many farmers have reported to us that they think that this has added to their farm operation,” Lehman said. “It gives them some income they might not otherwise get. Prices can change very quickly, and you have limited decision-making ability to deal with those changes. Having an alternate source of income that allows us to farm the way we want to farm is important.”

In addition to helping farmers negotiate fair lease payments with the utilities, Lehman said the farmers union has also encouraged farmers to develop wind energy projects that they own outright to ensure even more financial benefit.

Of course, wind energy hasn’t been without pushback in some parts of Iowa. In recent years, some counties have pushed back against new wind projects, and the state has also seen more dedicated opposition to the solar energy projects that are starting to emerge, in part over concerns about how it would affect farming.

While landowners who are profiting from wind are generally happy with the arrangement, neighbors who don’t see the financial benefits aren’t always keen on the whooshing noise the turbines make — or their blinking red lights.

“Folks who are getting a lease payment or compensated in some way might not be bothered, but for neighbors who don’t see the benefit or who have a negative association with the change, it might bother them more,” Johannsen said.

Johannsen, Thorne and others say that with more wind development and a burgeoning push on solar and battery storage in the state, there’s a very good chance that Iowa could vastly increase the supply of clean electricity in the coming years — both for itself and for the entire Midwest region. That, in turn, could help continue keeping electricity prices low, Johannsen said.

“Our early investment in wind has helped keep electricity rates lower compared to the rest of the country,” she said. Even with rising supply chain costs and increased demand, “our rates are lower than other areas, and you can attribute a lot of that to wind energy.”