The anti-wind president is bringing his energy pitch to the heartland of U.S. wind power.
Pressured by high and climbing electricity prices, President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Iowa on Tuesday as part of a midterm election strategy that aims to portray Republicans as the party of affordability, especially on energy. His administration is eager to tout its pro-fossil fuel and anti-renewable energy record.
Iowa is a tough place to test that message, though.
With some of the most abundant wind energy in the country and some of the lowest electric utility rates, Iowa undercuts the Trump administration’s claims that wind energy is unreliable and expensive.
Wind energy has directly held down Iowans’ electricity bills, according to the state’s largest utility. And it’s offered a significant income stream to both landowners and local governments. That has helped earn wind power the political support of Iowa’s top Republicans, from Sen. Chuck Grassley to Gov. Kim Reynolds.
Trump’s opposition to wind energy could blunt Republicans’ efforts to regain the upper hand on economic issues — especially in a state where three of the four congressional districts are competitive and where Democrats are increasingly bullish about their chances in this year’s gubernatorial race.
In fact, Trump’s position could offer Democrats a wedge issue to help them in November.
“A lot of the information that is out there that is negative on wind and solar, do not forget, comes in the form of lies from the oil companies,” State Auditor Rob Sand, the only statewide elected Democrat and a candidate for governor, said in a September town hall.
“We know what wind and solar are. Why do we know? Because we’ve been outside our whole lives,” he said, according to central Iowa’s Sun Courier. “It’s wind. It’s sun. They’re good. I enjoy them, and it’s wonderful, I think, that we can fuel our future and power our future with them.”
While Trump has long attacked clean energy policy as a whole, he’s been especially opposed to wind power. Part of the animus stems from the construction of a wind farm near a Trump golf course in Scotland.
“My goal is to not let any windmill be built,” Trump said this month at a White House meeting with oil executives. “They’re losers.”
Democrats have leveraged high electricity prices into an affordability message that’s translated into off-year election victories, making some Republicans nervous about the looming midterms. But Trump, after first dismissing affordability as a “hoax,” has mostly doubled-down on his existing strategy.
“We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office,” he told world leaders last week in Davos, “and we’re going to keep it that way.”
That’s an awkward fit with Iowa’s history. The state gets about two-thirds of its energy from wind and is the “second-largest wind power producer, after Texas,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In just five years — from 2019 to 2024 — wind energy went from producing 42 percent of the state’s net generation to 63 percent, the EIA found.
The wind boom came with benefits to ratepayers. In 2022 — while the rest of the country saw electricity prices start to spike, driven primarily by more expensive natural gas — gustier-than-expected winds led Iowa’s largest utility, MidAmerican Energy, to produce more wind energy than its total customer electricity demand. That directly curbed electricity prices, with MidAmerican crediting $314 million back to customers to pay down its rate base.
“It’s incredible to see the enormous amount of electricity that we’re now able to generate using renewable resources like wind and solar,” the utility’s Senior Vice President Mike Fehr said at the time. “With high natural gas prices in 2022, it couldn’t have come at a better time for our customers.”
Despite his opposition to wind power, Trump counts himself as a supporter of Iowa’s other energy industry, ethanol. The president is tentatively scheduled to visit an ethanol facility before his speech.
But that visit, too, comes with anger over the state’s other dominant renewable energy fuel source.
The state’s corn industry has become increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress from the administration and Congress in allowing a year-round E15 ethanol blend in gasoline. Last week, the House declined to include a provision in the spending bill it passed — punting instead to a rural electricity council.
“Corn growers are disgusted, disappointed and disillusioned that after spending years of calling for passage of E15, Congress has again punted, and it has done so in a spectacularly weak and offensive way,” National Corn Growers Association President Jed Bower said in a statement.
Ethanol politics also have become more fraught amid a push to build carbon pipelines across the state, connecting Iowa’s ethanol plants to underground sequestration in North Dakota.
Last year, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bipartisan bill to restrict eminent domain for carbon pipelines. Reynolds vetoed it, citing the need to position Iowa’s ethanol for low-carbon markets. But lawmakers are planning to try again this year.
Trump’s domestic policy legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, preserved the 45Q tax credit that subsidizes carbon-capture projects, even as the administration canceled carbon-capture projects, mostly in states governed by Democrats.
Republicans have urged the administration not to cancel more energy funding for their own states — including in Iowa.
Since Trump’s first term, Iowa has grown less reliant on fossil fuels, with coal use as an electricity-generating source dropping sharply from 35 percent in 2020 to 21 percent in 2024, according to an EIA analysis.
That has led some Republicans to push back on Trump’s wind vendetta.
Grassley, who helped create wind energy’s federal tax credit in the 1990s, has pushed back repeatedly on Trump’s often erroneous claims about wind turbines. He described as “idiotic” the president’s false assertion that wind turbines cause cancer and he said Trump could kill wind energy in the U.S. “over my dead body.”
