Iowa’s Wind Boom Stalls as Politics Clashes With Power Prices

Haley Zaremba

Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the…

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• Anti-renewable politics are slowing wind development in states that once led the industry.
• Iowa’s wind boom helped lower power prices, but local opposition has largely frozen new projects.
• The policy shift comes as U.S. electricity demand surges, raising risks for prices and competitiveness.

On January 20, the United States Department of Energy released a report on the first year of Donald Trump’s second term called “PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT” which touted a return to global energy dominance and a reversal of the “Biden energy subtraction agenda.” But on the ground in energy-industry states, the story is a lot more complicated. 

A groundswell of anti-renewable sentiment has cropped up in rural and red areas of the United States in recent years, echoed and crystallized by the Trump campaign but certainly not created by it. However, this stance has caused many local-level economies to plateau, as some of the nation’s biggest concentrations of renewable energy development were unfolding in red states and counties, which tend to hold the undeveloped land and the blue-collar workforce that such projects call for. 

In Iowa, for example – a state which voted for Trump in all three elections he ran in – wind energy has flourished over the past decade. Iowa is currently the second-largest wind producer after Texas, and wind energy provides around two-thirds of the state’s energy. The state’s largest utility reports that the growth of wind power in the midwestern state “has directly held down Iowans’ electricity bills” according to recent reporting from Politico’s E&E News. But now, Iowa’s wind industry has come to a near-complete standstill.

“Wind energy development has all but ground to a halt in the face of community opposition, a phaseout of federal tax credits and the Trump administration’s actions to slow the approval of federal permits,” reports The Gazette, a local news outlet based in Cedar Rapids. Now, many locals are wondering whether Iowans have shot themselves in the foot by embracing an anti-wind and anti-renewable political agenda.

And Iowans are not alone. “U.S. onshore wind is in its weakest shape in about a decade, not because the technology has stopped being competitive, but because the policy and, to an extent, the macro-environment have turned sharply against it,” Atin Jain, a BloombergNEF energy analyst, told The Gazette.

Embodying this opposition, Trump recently said, “my goal is to not let any windmill be built,” at a White House meeting with oil executives. “They’re losers.”

“We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office,” Trump went on to say at last month’s World Economic Forum summit in Davos, “and we’re going to keep it that way.”

This could be a major issue for wind-heavy states like Texas and Iowa, both of which helped to put Trump in office. And the bottoming out of renewable energy growth comes at a particularly painful time. Energy demand across the nation (and the world) is skyrocketing, driven by the AI boom and the voracious energy needs of data centers.

Trump’s energy policy and its gutting of renewable incentives “severely hamstrings the U.S. ability to meet skyrocketing power demands and dilutes its economic competitiveness on the global stage,” Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of Houston-based EDP Renewables North America, told Forbes last year.

Despite the current administration’s claims that it has made good on promises to lower energy prices nationwide, data from the United States Energy Information Administration suggest otherwise. Between November 2024 and 2025, nearly every state has seen an energy price jump, with many mid-Atlantic states seeing hikes between 10 and 15 percent.

Iowa, for its part, has only seen a 1.2 percent energy price increase over the last year. And many Iowans are standing strongly with Trump, and in opposition to any expansion of the wind industry that currently makes up the lion’s share of the country’s energy mix. At present, 58 of Iowa’s 99 counties have rules limiting wind power development, many of which have the strongest wind resources in the state.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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