Iowa's Coal Truth 

By Katie Rock

Over the past three months I have started traveling around the state to meet with Sierra Club groups and talk about Iowa’s coal fleet. Depending on where you live in Iowa, it’s easy to be unaware of how much coal is burned in our state.

Appearances can be deceiving. The truth is, behind all the windmills, coal remains the largest energy source in Iowa. We’re also taking longer to transition away from coal than other states too. The U.S. on average is using half as much coal as it did in 2010, but in Iowa coal power has declined by only a third, and has even increased in recent years. Coal power is currently the source of 43% of our energy. Wind-generated electricity climbed from 14% of our power to 36% over the same time, and gas grew to nearly 12%.  In a previous post, I explained how this shift to more wind and gas has not resulted in a significant decline in Iowa’s greenhouse gas emissions over the last decade. So what is going on? 

Data^[1] shows that over the past decade Iowa’s electricity sales have been pretty consistent outside of industrial use (see figure 1 below). MidAmerican Energy, the largest utility in Iowa, claims “it intends to become the first utility in the nation to provide 100 percent of its energy from renewable generation.” The reality is that even as they continue to build large wind projects, they have zero plans to stop burning coal. This means MidAmerican is, and will continue to be, the largest source of carbon pollution in our state. MidAmerican is also one of the largest utilities in the country without any commitment to reducing carbon emissions. So when MidAmerican says they will meet 100% of their customers’ needs with renewable energy, they might be technically right, but they’re conveniently leaving out all the dirty fossil fuels their burning on top of that. Figure 2 below illustrates the point.

Figure 1: Retail sales of electricity in Iowa by sector (Jan. 2008-June 2019)

Figure 2: Generation compared to customer sales for MidAmerican Energy from 2017 to 2021

Imagine our electric grid is a big pot of soup. Fossil fuels are soup ingredients that have been sitting around long past their expiration dates and are going to make you sick. Our chef, MidAmerican, promises new fresh ingredients. That’s all well and good but if they don’t dump the bad soup before adding the good, it will still make you sick. Like our soup metaphor MidAmerican has touted adding good ingredients to our electric grid (like wind), yet without a plan to dump the bad (coal and gas) they’re still poisoning us, and our climate, no matter how many carrots they throw in.

The dirty truth is that Iowa is still running largely on fossil fuels even if it continues leading the nation in wind energy. On top of all that data shows that while operating, all of the coal plants in Iowa are losing money. In the most recent Alliant rate case our expert testimony (which covered Alliant-operated coal plants as well as plants co-owned by MidAmerican and others) pointed out that in total, the plants inflicted a loss to customers of $32.7 million in 2018 alone! These losses are passed onto customers like you in the form of higher rates. If they continued at a similar level over the lives of those plants, customers could expect to suffer a loss of more than $680 million, while the utilities shoulder none of that financial burden. (Read how the rate case settlement will require Alliant to assess the economics of its coal plants compared to cleaner energy sources.)

Since 2017 wind and solar have been a cheaper way to generate electricity than coal and in many cases increasingly cheaper than gas too.^[2] The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal team has run the numbers across the country to show that not only is coal too dirty, but now also too costly to continue as a power source. You can read our latest analysis on the western U.S. utility PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, here. PacifiCorp is a sister utility to MidAmerican. After Sierra Club released its report, PacifiCorp conducted its own analysis and agreed that several of its coal plants are uneconomic, leading them to release retirement dates (Read a summary of their coal fleet retirement plans here on Utility Dive).

Our Iowa Beyond Coal team is speaking out on social media under the hashtag #CoalTruth and #Make100Mean100. Please add your voice to the call for action and follow us as we continue our tour on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

You can sign a petiton telling MidAmerican that Iowans are ready to move beyond coal -- sign the petition