Report: Iowa’s wind leadership not hurting consumers

(MCT) — Iowa’s wind power industry surged past California and Minnesota in 2008 to rank second nationally in generating capacity, according to a new report.

The annual rankings by the American Wind Energy Association placed Iowa behind only Texas. Installed wind generating capacity in Iowa ended the year at 2,791 megawatts, up more than 120 percent from the end of 2007.

Wind farms now generate enough energy to provide for 7.1 percent of the state’s power needs, according to the AWEA report. A second report from the Iowa Policy Project, however, said the figure is actually about 15 percent.

“We were just really surprised to find out that the percentage of generation (from wind) was at 15 percent,” said Teresa Galluzzo, research association for the Iowa Citybased group.

Galluzzo said the nonpartisan research group obtained its data from the Iowa Utilities Board. The wind association’s 7 percent figure is its estimate of how much of the state’s total energy needs for the entire year came from wind, while the Iowa Policy Project’s 15 percent figure represents the amount of total energy production at this time comes from wind.

Iowa Policy Project officials said the state could soon rival Denmark, the world leader in power production from wind. The group emphasized that the shift to wind energy is being done without harming Iowa consumers financially through higher energy bills.

“Iowa’s prices have remained lower than the national average and in fact haven’t been increasing as rapidly in recent years,” Galluzzo said.

MidAmerican Energy, the largest developer of wind power in Iowa, has a rate freeze in effect that is slated to last until 2014. It will soon be obtaining 18 percent of its total energy production from wind.

Iowa has also become a leading manufacturing location for wind energy equipment.

Three of the 26 wind production facilities opened or expanded nationally in 2008 were in Iowa, according to the wind association’s report. They were Acciona Energy in West Branch, which manufactures turbines, TPI Composites in Newton, which manufactures blades and Siemens Energy of Fort Madison, which manufactures blades.

The report listed 21 wind projects that were accomplished in Iowa during 2008, totaling 1,599.8 megawatts of wind power.