Two-thirds of Iowa’s electricity comes from wind turbines that sprout from fields like giant beanstalks.
The state’s vast expanses of exposed land—ideal for wind energy generation—also have the potential for excellent solar production. But so far, that hasn’t been the case. Instead, wind’s growth in Iowa has completely dwarfed solar, which still powers less than 2 percent of the grid.
That could soon change.
Last Thursday, the Iowa Utilities Commission approved a settlement that authorizes the largest utility-scale solar project in the state’s history.
MidAmerican Energy, which serves two-thirds of Iowa, will bring 800 megawatts of solar energy capacity online in the next few years. The investment will quintuple the utility’s existing solar resources and produce enough energy to power 144,000 homes.
I spoke with Josh Mandelbaum, a senior attorney with the Environmental Law & Policy Center and longtime advocate for Iowa’s transition to clean energy, about the significance of the settlement.
“I think it demonstrates that utilities in the state are looking to capture the solar resource like they’ve captured the wind resource,” Mandelbaum told me. “Because our wind resource is so good, the focus has been on wind. But Iowa can be a leader in both sources.”
Iowa has been ahead on wind energy use since 1983, when it became the first state to adopt a renewable portfolio standard, requiring utilities to purchase wind-generated power. Fifty years later, wind now accounts for 66.7 percent of Iowa’s electrical mix—a larger slice than any other state, including Texas.
I asked Mandelbaum why it’s taken Iowa utilities so long to realize solar’s potential. He told me it’s because Iowa is one of the few states that does not require public utilities to conduct integrated resource planning, a process during which providers identify the most cost-effective and reliable combination of energy resources or storage technologies to meet future demand.
If that planning process were mandatory, Iowa utilities would have turned to solar much sooner, said Mandelbaum. Environmental groups had begun advocating for both resource planning and more solar seven years ago, he told me. Their own modeling revealed solar as a good option in a range of future electricity cost and demand growth scenarios.
In a 2023 settlement authorizing MidAmerican to undertake massive wind and smaller solar developments, known as Wind PRIME, those environmental groups lobbied for stipulations asking the company to engage in resource planning. The commission agreed, and the terms of the Wind PRIME settlement tasked MidAmerican with voluntary resource planning.
Through that planning, the utility concluded that expanding its solar fleet would be the most cost-effective way to meet growth in electricity demand. Those findings led to the recent, landmark solar settlement, which will allow them to build solar capacity while still qualifying for federal production tax credits phased out for any facilities brought online after December 31, 2027.
The new settlement includes additional requirements for future resource planning, said Mandelbaum, outlining an iterative three-round framework that will hopefully enable environmental groups and the Iowa Utilities Commission to weigh in on methods or findings.
Joshua Byrnes, one of three members of the Iowa Utilities Commission, all appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, emphasized the need for integrated resource planning in a “state of utilities” address he delivered at the Iowa Environmental Council’s annual conference this week.
“We have states that are now doing integrated resource planning for gas,” said Byrnes “We have states that are doing integrated resource planning for water, and we’re not even there yet on electric.”
Resource planning led MidAmerican to conclude solar was a cost-effective investment, but when I asked Byrnes about the future of solar in Iowa as federal production tax credits are on the brink of expiring, he equivocated.
“Do we continue to build if [production tax credits] are not there? It depends on who’s doing it. Those PTCs are maybe, sometimes, the only reason they’re building it.”
Solar will still be cost-competitive in Iowa without federal tax credits, Mandelbaum assured me. It just won’t be a discount option.
And as long as coal retirement remains a long-term goal in Iowa (MidAmerican has publicly announced potential retirement dates for each of its six coal plants in the state), a balanced approach to energy planning, including more expansion into solar, may be key to maintaining a stable and sustainable grid.
Coal currently provides 20 percent of Iowa’s electricity. In its eventual absence, what alternative source will complement Iowa’s wind generation? Mandelbaum says solar. Byrnes anticipates natural gas.
Confronted with load growth, largely due to increased energy demand from data centers opening in Iowa, Byrnes said that gas has come to the forefront of conversations about dispatchable energy in Iowa.
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Donate Now“Is it the complete solution? Probably not. Is it the most perfect solution? No, but I feel like we’re being thrust into a situation where we’re just looking for the fastest way that we can generate electricity,” said Byrnes.
Byrnes is also dubious of landowners’ willingness to deal with solar infrastructure on their property. “I just call it landowner fatigue,” he said. “We have a docket in front of us that is kind of blowing up in terms of comments and people resisting a solar project. We didn’t really see that much before.”
Diverting land from agriculture to solar energy use is already controversial in Iowa, where 84 percent of land is used to grow crops or raise livestock. But choosing between corn production and solar is a false choice, Mandelbaum said. “When you look at it, 60 percent of the corn crop is used for ethanol. And so it’s already used for energy.”
Comparing the energy produced by ethanol from one acre of corn with that produced by an acre of solar panels, solar could fuel an electric vehicle for far more miles than the ethanol produced could fuel a standard gas-burning automobile, Mandelbaum told me.
“Take just a small amount of [cropland] out and use it for solar, and it diversifies both your electricity mix and your fuel mix. And that seems like a win-win,” he said.
“When you look at it, 60 percent of the corn crop is used for ethanol. And so it’s already used for energy.”
— Josh Mandelbaum, Environmental Law & Policy Center
To produce the same amount of energy, corn ethanol biofuel uses thirty times as much land as solar requires, research has shown.
Notably, the MidAmerican settlement included a dissenting opinion from Sarah Martz, chair of the utilities commission. “It was interesting. Her dissent was more consumer-focused,” said Mandelbaum.
Martz’s criticisms were not with the solar project as a whole, but rather with specific clauses within the settlement, which exempt costs created by U.S. tariffs from prudency reviews, caveat revenue sharing with customers, and apply a new ratemaking principle to Wind PRIME, a previous and separate docket.
“Renewable resources such as solar offer low-cost energy production and tax credits that serve to offset the project costs. MidAmerican’s consumers should receive those benefits,” she concluded her dissent.
Even the dissent, then, seems like a win for solar in Iowa, acknowledging the energy source’s cost-effectiveness. Perhaps soon we’ll see the occasional rolling field of “low-cost energy production.”
Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:
Legal Experts Aghast at Trump Challenge to Wind Farm: The Trump administration is asking a court to vacate the federal government’s prior approval of a permit for a 2-gigawatt offshore wind project to be built off the shore of Ocean City, Maryland. The use of the courts to try to undo a permit issued under the Biden administration is alarming, not only for the wind industry but for legal experts, who warn that this ability to undo a previous administration’s actions would set a harmful precedent, as my colleague Aman Azhar reports for ICN. Also, the Trump administration’s opposition to offshore wind is a serious problem for New England states that were planning to rely on this resource to do much of the work to meet emissions targets, as Ella Nilsen reports for CNN.
Hyundai Battery Plant Faces Delay After Immigration Raid: A recent immigration raid at a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia is leading to strains in the relationship between the United States and South Korea and a delay in the plant’s opening. Jose Munoz, Hyundai’s CEO, said he was surprised when he learned of the raid and found that most of the affected workers were South Korean employees of LG, the battery company that is Hyundai’s partner in the project, as Nora Eckert reports for Reuters. The $7.6 billion factory was set to come online later this year, and now the company is pushing back that timetable by two to three months.
India Unlocks Geothermal With First National Policy: India has joined the growing list of countries looking underground to power their grids. On Monday, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy unveiled the first national policy supporting geothermal projects for the next 30 years, Sethuraman NR reports for Reuters. In addition to providing incentives for geothermal development, the policy aims to accelerate the repurposing of abandoned oil and gas wells and the deployment of ground-source heat pumps for heating and cooling. India has identified 381 hot springs and 10 geothermal provinces, including Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the MNRE said.
U.S. Dept. of Energy Bets on Fusion: The Trump DOE announced $134 million in funding last week in an attempt to bridge the massive technical challenges involved in scaling nuclear development. “In the context of fusion energy development, that’s a drop in the bucket,” Edwin Lyman, a physicist and the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told my colleague Arcelia Martin, reporting for ICN. The federal financial support comes as Trump has halted progress on renewable energy projects involving wind and solar.
Inside Clean Energy is ICN’s weekly bulletin of news and analysis about the energy transition. Send news tips and questions to [email protected].
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Anika Jane Beamer
Reporter, Iowa
Anika Jane Beamer covers the environment and climate change in Iowa, with a particular focus on water, soil and CAFOs. A lifelong Midwesterner, she writes about changing ecosystems from one of the most transformed landscapes on the continent. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Grinnell College. She is a former Outrider Fellow at Inside Climate News and was named a Taylor-Blakeslee Graduate Fellow by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
