How Iowa has turned against wind

The opposition organized on social media, including a Facebook group, Page County Horizons, which served as a forum to encourage attendance at public meetings and to share video clips and articles portraying wind energy as dangerous and unreliable.

Todd Maher, who lives within view of the wind farm, opposed the project and decided in 2022 to run for the county Board of Supervisors because he felt that officials weren’t listening to concerns. He won in the Republican primary, defeating the incumbent, who supported the wind farm, and then ran unopposed in the general election.

“A lot of people want to live where they can see the sunrise and sunset without having to look at a wind turbine,” he said in a recent interview.

Maher, 55, lives on an acreage with a donkey, chickens, cats, and dogs. He has worked for most of his adult life at the Pella Corp. window plant in Shenandoah.

One of his main concerns with the wind farm was the disconnect he observed between the landowners who would receive lease payments and residents who would actually see the turbines every day. Most of the owners don’t live near the turbines, and many of them don’t live in the county or the state, he said.

This isn’t unusual, with the heirs of farmers and investment companies owning a large share of U.S. farmland. But it’s frustrating, said Maher, that people who live in the area will have their views spoiled while somebody else is paid for the leases.

Once Maher took office, he found it wasn’t easy to stop the project. The board passed a moratorium on wind energy development that was to include Shenandoah Hills. Invenergy responded by suing the county, arguing that the sudden change should require taxpayers to reimburse the company for the money it had already spent.

Legal counsel warned county officials that there was a decent chance of losing in court and then facing a judgment so large that the government might need to file for bankruptcy.

Maher was unwilling to take that risk. In November 2024, he was in the majority in a 2–1 vote to accept a settlement with Invenergy that would allow the project to move forward.

​“It was the toughest vote I’ve ever made,” he said. ​“I lost a lot of friends over it. I lost a lot of people that supported me.”

“Closed for business”

Iowa, especially its western half, has some of the richest wind resources in the country.

Early developers capitalized on this, with the completion of Storm Lake 1 in northwestern Iowa in 1999, the first wind farm in the state, with a capacity exceeding 100 megawatts. By 2010, wind farms were a familiar part of the landscape, with more than 3,500 megawatts of capacity, including some large installations along Interstate 80, the major east–west highway that bisects the state, connecting California to New Jersey.

For years, Iowa’s leadership in wind energy was a point of pride, with the silhouette of a wind turbine appearing on the state’s license plate next to images of city skylines and farm buildings.

Wind power enjoyed bipartisan support in the state, with proponents including Democrats such as former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and former Gov. Tom Vilsack and Republicans such as former Gov. Terry Branstad and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. They viewed wind farms as an opportunity to increase incomes in rural counties.

Their vision paid off. As of 2024, Iowa led the country in the share of electricity produced by wind farms, with 63 percent.

But the era of growth in Iowa’s wind industry is almost certainly nearing its end. Shenandoah Hills was one of just three wind farms to be completed in the state in 2025, and only one was completed in 2024, according to the EIA. The last significant year of development was 2020, when 12 projects went online.

The contraction of the industry is a grave concern for Jeff Danielson, a Democrat who served four terms in the Iowa Senate and now is vice president of advocacy for Clean Grid Alliance, a clean energy business group.

“Iowa is essentially closed for business when it comes to wind development,” he said.

The resistance comes almost entirely from the local level. His organization lists 58 of Iowa’s 99 counties as having rules designed to limit wind power development, including many of the counties with the strongest wind resources.

He described the opposition as formidable in its ability to organize at the local level and then throw out a large number of objections in the hope that one of them will stick. It’s not a fair fight, with one side repeating a litany of claims found on anti-wind websites, and the wind power companies obligated to stick to facts that will stand up in court, said Danielson.

“It’s not even really an adult conversation anymore,” he said.

If Iowa’s legislature and governor wanted to encourage wind energy development, they could pass a law to expand state authority to approve projects, limiting the ability of local governments to pass restrictions. The state has previously done this on hot-button issues such as regulating large animal-feeding operations, but there’s little indication they’ll intervene when it comes to wind.

“One thing you find out about legislators is they like local control when they like it, and they don’t always like it,” said Iowa Rep. Brent Siegrist, a Republican whose district is a short drive from Shenandoah.

Siegrist supports wind energy and thinks it is important for making Iowa an attractive location for providing plentiful, affordable electricity for data centers. But he doesn’t expect any push at the state level to make it easier to build wind farms. Republicans control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.

“I’m not sure that we would step into that,” he said.

Exacerbating global roadblocks

If Iowa isn’t building much wind power, it’s a bad sign for the industry as a whole.

But local opposition in rural areas is just one of several obstacles for wind developers.

The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July included a rapid phaseout of the production tax credit, an important federal policy that had helped encourage development.

Developers are now on a tight deadline. Projects must be completed by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify for the tax credit.

Amid the rush to begin construction, the Trump administration has issued executive orders to slow development of wind and solar. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken additional steps, requiring that he personally sign off on new wind or solar projects subject to his agency’s jurisdiction.

Jain, the BloombergNEF analyst, said the global wind energy market faces challenges tied to local acceptance and slow progress in building enough power lines to serve new projects. 

The United States deals with those same problems, as well as the obstacles created by its federal policies.

The U.S. outlook, Jain said, ​“now looks so much weaker than the global picture.”

Uncertain ground

In Shenandoah, the wind farm is up and running, but the debate over its approval has left scars.

In February 2025, Invenergy sold the project to MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s largest electricity utility. Invenergy quietly walked away from the wind farm while MidAmerican inherited a community relations crisis.

MidAmerican has attempted to smooth things over, hosting events for landowners and community members and meeting with supervisors and engineers of Page and Fremont counties.

Outside the two counties, MidAmerican’s publicity for the wind farm has been scant. However, in recent correspondence with Inside Climate News, the company expressed no regrets over its decision to take on the project.

“The Shenandoah Hills wind farm is an economic success story for both Page and Fremont counties,” Geoff Greenwood, media relations manager for MidAmerican, wrote in an email. The company projects paying nearly $87 million to Fremont County and $65 million to Page County in property taxes over the life of the project, said Greenwood.

“Wind energy has helped us create relationships with partner landowners and helps Iowa attract new companies to the state. It also provides direct, long-term economic benefits to our rural areas,” Greenwood added.

But as the very last turbines were erected outside Shenandoah, the atmosphere hardly felt triumphant.

The closest thing to a celebration was a ribbon-cutting held in September 2024 when Invenergy opened an office in downtown Shenandoah to manage the construction and community relations.

Connell, who has been unabashed in his support for the project since the beginning, was one of the people holding the ribbon. But his words that day didn’t feel like a victory lap.

“This has been a difficult project,” he said, quoted by KMA, the local radio station. ​“There are people that oppose wind, and there are people for wind. But I admire the fact that Invenergy, in my estimation, has taken the high ground on everything.”

The office closed a few months later, around the time of the sale to MidAmerican.

Maher, the county supervisor, wishes the wind farm had never happened. But since it’s here, he is hopeful that he and his neighbors can learn to live with the change.

“Maybe things will not be as bad [as we fear, and] we can find a good common ground to where we can coexist.”