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Loading...20% of Iowa’s Electricity Generated by Wind Power
- Jake Richardson
- August 7, 2010
- 3:03 pm
- 82 comments
The state of Iowa has been steadily increasing its wind power capacity over the last several years. A press release from this year says that up to 20 percent of Iowa’s electricity is produced by wind. The document is from the Iowa Policy Project.
The organization’s director, David Osterberg said of the trend, “In the last two years, Iowa added 2,500 megawatts of wind turbine capacity, and now has wind capacity nearly six times the size of Iowa’s lone nuclear plant.” Electricity prices in Iowa are also below the national average even though they have been investing in renewable technology, says the press release. About five percent of Iowa’s electricity was generated by wind power in 2006.
The state is not finished with its wind power growth. There is much more wind potential to be harvested according to research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showing, “roughly three-quarters of Iowa has high enough wind at 80 meters above the ground to produce wind energy.”
An American Wind Energy Association report on Iowa stated at the end of 2009 the state had 3,670 megawatts of wind power. The total wind power potential is vast, a research study concluded over 4,000 percent of Iowa’s current electricity use could generated. It also said between 5,000 and 10,000 jobs are directly and indirectly related to wind energy production there.
Seventy-five percent of Iowa’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants. The state also has one nuclear power plant.
Image Credit: Andrea Pkryzwinski
Read more: Community, Conscious Consumer, Life, solar-power
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people are talking
Attention span is definitely shorter than it used to be, in our lower elementary school. Fast pace …
Thank you for the recipe
Sounds good. Thanks for the recipe.
Bravo to you my little fur person. Shame on u for walking out of the house without him
Very helpful, especially the two notes about pasta. Thanks!
82 comments
+ add your ownkudos to IA--I bet that could be even higher, too
It's a good start.
thanks for sharing
I always feel a thrill passing by the huge wind farms in Iowa.
Good start
Sounds wonderful!
The oil co's make billions each qtr.Gasoline is way too hi due
to the hi price of manipulated oil prices.The supreme ct has
given them pwr to control our elections insuring their continued
rip off of the avg american.They can give unlimited funds to
sponsor trash talk ads.Its using our money to tell us who to
vote for.
goodie
go solar go, the way to go Iowa, may you keep on going with solar, especially as much as possible made in the U.S.A.
It will be interesting to see how this business moves along; how many other things we'll learn as it grows.
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