During one of Donald Trump’s first visits to this politically important state, then-Gov. Terry Branstad highlighted a structure on a hilltop during their ride from the airport to a political event on the fairgrounds.
The 133-foot-tall wind turbine, the fair’s tallest attraction, has been there for close to two decades. It is a testament to the longstanding importance of wind energy in a state that put Trump on the road to the White House—twice—with its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses.
Branstad and other Iowans managed to convince Trump to support corn-based ethanol—another important energy product in this state. But they have had no luck quashing his hatred of wind turbines, a cornerstone of his broader assault on renewable energy.
“Energy prices have been going down, other than in certain states where you have Democrat-run states, where they put windmills all over the place,” Trump said this summer. “Anytime you see a windmill, you’ll say, they have bad energy costs.”
Branstad, who served as Trump’s ambassador to China during his first term, disagrees with his former boss.
“We want to make sure that he understands wind energy is important for Iowa,” the former governor said in an interview.
Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas—all states that backed Trump—are the nation’s top wind energy producers. But that hasn’t kept the president’s administration from taking actions that threaten jobs and tens of billions of dollars in new investment.
Iowa alone has more than 100 large wind farms and two new projects planned for delivery through 2027, according to federal data.
Current Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said wind has helped keep electricity prices low.
“We don’t have gas or oil in our state, but we have renewables,” she said in an interview. “We have biofuels and we have wind. We are on a wind path. So, we can make it work for our state.”
States that embrace renewable energy are far more likely to save money for electricity consumers than those relying on fossil fuels or nuclear power, a POLITICO analysis of federal and industry data shows — findings that undermine one of the Trump administration’s main justifications for its aggressive rollback of federal clean energy policies.
POLITICO’s analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration power price data contradicts arguments by President Donald Trump and his appointees that a heavy dependence on wind and solar power drives up electricity prices. Trump repeated that claim in his speech late last month to the United Nations, describing wind as the “most expensive energy ever conceived” and contending that “all green is all bankrupt.”
“We’re getting rid of the falsely named renewables,” said Trump, whose agencies have wiped out tens of billions of dollars in Biden-era clean energy and climate spending while pushing for more production of oil, natural gas and coal. “By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive.”
The data from Trump’s own administration shows a much different picture, reflecting a sizable drop in wind and power costs during the past two decades.
Among the 22 states that drew higher-than-average shares of their power from wind and solar, 17 had below-average electricity prices in June, according to EIA data.
Those states defied the red-blue state paradigm: Thirteen of those green-heavy, low-cost states backed Trump in 2024.
During his Sept. 23 United Nations speech, Trump suggested wind energy is promoted by China to take advantage of Americans.
“So why is it that they build them, and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them?” he said. “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.”
China, the biggest U.S. rival in the race to build data centers and power infrastructure for artificial intelligence, is the world’s largest producer of wind energy and last year accounted for 72% of the global market for new wind turbines, according to the World Wind Energy Association. It also relies heavily on coal and continues to build more solar and nuclear energy.
Texas Energy and Power Newsletter:
In New York last week, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said wholesale electricity costs in Texas are up 100% in the last five years.
The context makes it worse. Here’s what Wright said: “Texas has the fastest rising wholesale electricity prices of any region in the country, 100 percent rise in wholesale prices from the start of the Biden administration to today.”
That is objectively false.
The fastest rising wholesale costs of any region?! Has he heard of PJM?
Here are some facts, which one would hope the Secretary of Energy would have access to:
- According to ERCOT’s Independent Market Monitor, adjusted for inflation, wholesale prices in 2024 were lower than 2020, which was the COVID year. To repeat, not only are prices not up 100% from 4-5 years ago, they are actually lower.
- There were three high-priced years: 2021 (due to Winter Storm Uri), 2022 (due to higher gas prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine), and 2023 (due to the second-hottest summer in recorded Texas history and a dearth of solar and batteries to provide electricity during peak and net peak periods, respectively).
- Costs in 2024 – Texas’ sixth-hottest summer – were 50% lower than 2023. It was, according to ERCOT and the IMM, one of the lowest-cost years in the history of the Texas market.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/08/trump-administration-fossil-fuels-climate
As bad as this is, remember that the entire Bush II administration was run by people from the oil and gas industry (including both the President and the VP). They did their share of doctoring official US government climate change reports.
Hawaii (35.1¢/kWh) finally got rid of its coal plants, but still relies on an insane amount of petroleum plants burning fuel shipped in across the ocean:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Hawaii_electricity_production_by_type.webp/1920px-Hawaii_electricity_production_by_type.webp.png