How Iowa Became a Wind Power State Under Republican Governors

In 1983, a young Republican governor named Terry Branstad, in his first year in office, signed a modest bill that required Iowa's investor-owned electric utilities to buy or own a small amount of power from renewable sources. The number in the law was 105 megawatts, split between the utilities, a figure so small it would barely register on today's grid. Nobody at the time thought of it as the start of anything. The farm economy was sliding into the worst crisis since the Depression, interest rates were punishing, and land values were collapsing. Wind turbines were mostly something you read about in California, where tax breaks had produced a scattering of small machines on mountain passes. And yet that Iowa law is now generally described as the first renewable portfolio standard in the United States, the ancestor of rules that most states adopted later. Four decades on, wind turbines stand in rows across the cornfields, and wind produces more than half of the electricity generated in Iowa. Branstad, who served longer as governor than anyone in American history, presided over much of that growth. So did governors of the other party. Very little of it was driven by climate politics.

In short: Iowa became one of the country's top wind power states through a mix of an early state mandate, a federal tax credit written by a Republican senator from Iowa, steady wind, cheap land, and lease payments that gave farmers a stake. Governors of both parties backed it. The lesson is that clean energy can win in rural, Republican places when it is built around income and local benefit, though local fights over turbines show the coalition has to be maintained.

A law ahead of its time

The 1983 statute, part of what Iowa called its alternative energy production law, did not do much at first. Utilities resisted it, disputes over how to price the required purchases took years to settle, and the technology was not ready. Through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Iowa wind was a curiosity rather than an industry.

What the law did was plant an idea in state policy: that utilities had an obligation to buy some renewable power, and that the state could require it. When the economics changed, the idea was already in the statute books.

It is worth sitting with the timing. Branstad signed it in the same era when, nationally, the Reagan administration was pulling back federal support for renewable energy research and letting solar tax credits expire. Iowa's step was small, but it went the other way.

The senator and the credit

The second piece came from Washington, and again from an Iowa Republican. Senator Chuck Grassley, who has represented the state since 1981, was the author of the federal production tax credit for wind power, enacted as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. Unlike a credit for building something, a production tax credit pays per unit of electricity generated, which rewards turbines that actually run. Grassley has often described himself as the credit's father, and he defended it for decades against efforts to let it lapse, including from members of his own party.

The credit was renewed many times, often at the last minute and sometimes after it had briefly expired, which created a boom-and-bust cycle in the industry. When the credit was in place, wind developers rushed to build; when it lapsed, orders fell off a cliff. Even so, its steady presence over most of three decades was one of the main reasons wind power became cheaper and more widespread in the United States.

Iowa had the other ingredients. The wind across the state's western and northern counties is strong and steady. Land is flat and open, and a turbine takes up only a small footprint, so farmers can keep planting corn and soybeans right up to the base. The state had transmission lines, a utility industry interested in growth, and, eventually, a large and very well-capitalized utility, MidAmerican Energy, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, that decided wind was a good business.

The farmer's lease check

If there is one fact that explains Iowa wind's political durability, it is this: turbines pay landowners. A wind developer leases land from farmers, and each turbine brings in an annual payment to the family whose land it stands on. Developers also pay property taxes or similar payments to counties and school districts, which in many rural places have become a significant share of local revenue.

For farmers, that payment arrives regardless of the corn price or the weather. In bad years it can be the difference between keeping the farm and selling. For counties, the tax revenue has paid for roads, schools and services without raising rates on residents. That made wind something very different from an environmental cause. It was an economic development program with a check attached.

Manufacturing followed for a time. Blade and tower factories opened in the state in the 2000s. One of them took over space in Newton, the town that lost its biggest employer when the Maytag appliance company left. Community colleges started training wind turbine technicians, an occupation federal labor statisticians have listed among the fastest-growing in the country. Some of those factories later closed or shifted as the industry changed, which is a reminder that manufacturing jobs follow orders, not slogans.

The memory of the farm crisis

There is a reason lease income landed so hard in rural Iowa, and it goes back to the decade when the 1983 law was signed. The farm crisis of the 1980s was brutal. Farmers who had borrowed heavily during the boom of the 1970s, encouraged to expand production and buy more land, were caught when interest rates soared and export markets shrank. Iowa farmland lost much of its value within a few years. Banks failed. Families who had worked the same ground for generations lost it at auction. Small towns emptied as farms consolidated and young people left.

People who lived through that period, or grew up hearing about it, learned a lasting lesson about how exposed a farm family is to forces it cannot control: commodity prices, interest rates, trade fights, weather. Anything that steadies income has real value. A wind lease does exactly that. It is not a fortune, and it does not replace farming, but it is a predictable payment that arrives whether the corn price is high or low.

That history helps explain why wind found allies among farm groups, county supervisors and rural legislators who would never have called themselves environmentalists. It also explains some of the resentment where projects did not share the wealth. In a community shaped by the memory of losing the farm, the sight of a neighbour getting lease checks while you get only the view can feel like one more deal written for somebody else.

Wires, weather and a regional grid

Turbines are only half of a wind economy. The other half is the grid that carries the power and balances it. Iowa sits inside a large regional transmission organization that stretches across much of the middle of the country, which lets the state send surplus wind power to neighbours on windy nights and draw on other sources when the air is still. In the early 2010s, that regional grid operator approved a set of major new transmission lines across the Midwest, partly to move wind power from the windy western part of the region to the population centers in the east, with the cost shared broadly across the region.

That arrangement is part of why Iowa can run on so much wind without the lights going out. It also shows the limits of state policy. A state can mandate renewable power and offer friendly permitting, but it cannot by itself build the interstate lines that make a high-wind grid work. That requires cooperation among states, utilities and federal regulators, a slower and more contentious process, and one where rural landowners again have a stake in how routes are drawn and how they are paid.

Governors of both parties

Branstad served as governor from 1983 to 1999, then again from 2011 to 2017, when he left to become U.S. ambassador to China. In between, two Democrats, Tom Vilsack and Chet Culver, held the office, and both supported wind development. After Branstad, Kim Reynolds, his lieutenant governor and also a Republican, took over and has remained a supporter of the industry, often pointing to wind as a source of low electricity rates and rural income.

What is striking is how rarely Iowa's wind growth was framed as climate policy by the people who made it happen. Republican officials talked about energy independence, farm income, low rates, rural jobs and corporate investment. Tech companies building data centers in Iowa said they came partly for the clean power, which made wind a selling point for economic development. Democrats sometimes talked about climate; the coalition did not depend on it.

By the 2020s, Iowa was generating more than half its electricity from wind over a full year, the first state to reach that mark, and it ranked behind only Texas in total wind generation.

The other side's case, and the local fights

It would be a fairy tale to say everyone in Iowa loves wind. In recent years, residents in a number of counties have organized against new turbines, objecting to their height, their noise, the blinking red lights at night, their effect on views and property values, and the feeling that decisions are made by outside companies. Some county boards have passed ordinances requiring large setbacks from homes or effectively blocking new projects. Those concerns come from neighbours, not from oil companies, and they deserve to be taken seriously.

There are also broader conservative critiques: that wind depends on subsidies, that its intermittency requires backup power, and that national policy should not favor one technology. The 2025 federal tax law sharply cut back the credits for new wind and solar projects, setting deadlines that will end them for projects not begun or completed soon, which will test how much of Iowa's wind growth continues without federal help.

My view, stated as a view: the strongest response to the local critics is not to call them obstructionists but to make sure the benefits are shared. Projects that pay neighbours as well as host landowners, that respect reasonable setbacks, and that put money into community funds tend to face less opposition. That is less a progressive principle than a practical one. A turbine near a house where the family gets nothing is very different from one near a house where the family gets a check. The broader answer on intermittency is that Iowa's grid has been running on a majority of wind generation for years with the help of a large regional grid, and storage and transmission are improving.

Iowa's experience also shows that support for wind can shift as the industry matures. In the early years, a new wind farm was a novelty and a source of local pride. As turbines grew taller and projects moved closer to more homes, the balance of local opinion changed in some counties. The coalition that built Iowa wind was never a permanent fixture. It has had to be renewed, county by county, by developers and officials willing to listen to neighbours as well as landowners.

What Iowa teaches the rest of the country

Iowa's wind story undercuts a common assumption, the one that says clean energy is a blue-state cause and rural Republican places are hostile to it. The truth is more complicated and more hopeful. Clean energy in Iowa grew because it fit the interests of people who live there: farmers who wanted income, counties that wanted tax revenue, utilities that wanted cheap power, and politicians who wanted economic development.

For progressives, the lesson is about humility and framing. The most successful clean energy state in the Midwest got there without much help from climate rhetoric and with plenty of help from Republican officeholders. Respecting that, and building on what already works for people, is more likely to expand clean energy than insisting that everyone first agree on why it matters.

The people at the center of this story are farm families. Picture a couple in their sixties in northwest Iowa with three turbines on their land, a son who wants to keep farming and a daughter who trained as a wind technician at the local community college. Their politics probably do not line up with ours on most things. Their stake in clean energy is as real as anyone's.

What you can do

Iowa's experience shows that clean energy decisions are made in statehouses, county boardrooms and utility commissions as much as in Congress.

1. See your state's power mix. The climate dashboard shows the U.S. power mix and clean power by state, so you can compare your state's wind and solar share with Iowa's.
2. Talk to your representatives about energy tax credits. The federal credits that built Iowa's wind industry were set by Congress, and the find-your-representatives page lists your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators with phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes.
3. Look at bipartisan bills. The common-ground page shows bills that passed Congress with support from both parties, which is where most durable energy policy has come from.
4. Follow the policy. The climate policy topic page gathers coverage of federal and state clean energy rules and the fights over them.

The 105 megawatts in that 1983 law are a rounding error on Iowa's grid now. What mattered was that someone wrote the idea down, and that people of both parties kept finding reasons to build on it.