A report shows Iowa made significant strides in advancing renewable energy over the last two decades with wind and solar rising to 64-percent of Iowa’s electricity generation last year.
Steve Guyer, the main author of the report for the Iowa Environmental Council, says the state’s utilities need to speed up efforts to transition away from coal to reach national and international targets to help stave off climate change.
“We clearly are already uniquely positioned, but if we aggressively take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there are a lot of incentives and a lot of mechanisms,” Guyer says, “and by the way, these will last all the way through 2032, that can get us there.”
Guyer says Iowa relied predominately on coal back in the year 2000, but wind generation started to really pick up around 2008. “And 2019 was actually the cross-over point where we started generating more wind in the state than we actually generated coal,” he says.
Guyer says the reduction in coal production over the last two decades reflects another important trend. “Power plant emissions have come down, quite a bit since 2005,” he says.
To reduce emissions further, Guyer says utilities need to shut down the state’s remaining coal plants. MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s largest utility, says it plans to do that and reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by investing more in wind and solar, as well as nuclear.
Des Moines-based MidAmerican jointly owns six coal plants in the state, and says it has more wind generation capacity than any other regulated utility in the nation.
(By Rachel Cramer, Iowa Public Radio)