Taking advantage of the wind in Iowa.
Iowa now gets a higher percentage of its power from wind than any other state in the nation. The Des Moines Register is reporting that Iowa’s wind generation hit the 20% mark last quarter, supplying the state with a full one fifth of its energy needs. That’s really good — like, Denmark good. Stats like this make it harder and harder for cleantech foes to deny that renewable power is fast becoming an integral part of the American energy mix…
The Register has the details:
Iowa’s wind generation reached 20 percent of the state’s total electricity network during the second quarter, the American Wind Energy Association reports … A major boost came from MidAmerican Energy’s new 594-megawatt wind farm near Adair, the first of three major wind projects the Des Moines utility plans for this year.
MidAmerican already had 1,330 megawatts of wind generation capacity on its system. The utility’s peak loads this summer have totaled about 4,700 megawatts. The second-largest wind generator in Iowa is Florida-based NextEra, which has about 800 megawatts of wind farm capacity mostly in central and northern Iowa.
Iowa is now the second biggest wind power market in the nation, with over 4,000 megawatts of installed capacity. Texas has more than twice that, and currently leads the market with 9,000 MW. But Texas, of course, is much more populous than Iowa — which makes the small Midwestern state’s effective embrace of wind power all the more remarkable.
And it marks a welcome trend: a resurgence of the domestic wind power industry, which, along with seemingly every other industry in America, lost its footing after the 2008 crash. The American Wind Energy Association reports that “7,354 megawatts of new capacity was under construction nationally by July 1, more than at any time since the third quarter of 2008.”
Good news indeed — Keep the wind power coming.
