ICYMI: POLITICO: In windy Iowa, a GOP lawmaker faces a reckoning over Trump’s clean energy war

Washington, D.C. – Reporting from Politico reveals that Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who just last month told Politico that “wind works”, is at risk of losing her seat because of her vote to kill wind power, hiking up energy costs for her constituents and destroying clean energy jobs in her home state. Representative Miller-Meeks is one of 15 key GOP House members who have raked in a combined $3,323,511 in donations from the oil industry, giving them even more special tax loopholes while putting 111,900 home-state clean energy jobs on the chopping block. 

POLITICO: In windy Iowa, a GOP lawmaker faces a reckoning over Trump’s clean energy war

President Donald Trump’s bid to kill wind power is straining the clean energy industry — and imperiling GOP lawmakers whose communities have seen wind as an economic boon.

Few of those lawmakers are more endangered than Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

Hailing from a state that gets nearly two-thirds of its electricity from wind turbines while paying some of the lowest power bills in the nation, Miller-Meeks has been a leading GOP champion in the House for an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy supporting the growth of renewables alongside fossil fuels. But she also cast a crucial vote for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which wiped out billions of dollars in wind’s economic incentives — throwing Iowa’s 50-plus wind-related companies into uncertainty.

That vote is giving Democrats new hope of capturing Miller-Meek’s district in Iowa’s southeast corner, where she won reelection last year by only 798 votes. (Trump won the same district by 8 points.) Republicans are scrambling to preserve their narrow House majority in next year’s midterms, with national polls showing most voters unhappy with the GOP’s sweeping budget bill.

In an interview this month at the state Republican Party office in Des Moines, Miller-Meeks stood by her advocacy for wind power — saying it deserves a place in the nation’s energy mix even amid Trump’s full-bore backing for fossil fuels.

“Wind works,” said Miller-Meeks, who also chairs the Conservative Climate Caucus. “Iowa has proved that.”

But the following morning, she stood side by side at the Ames National Laboratory with Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who used the occasion to argue that heavy federal government spending on renewable energy is “nonsensical.” He also called wind and solar “mature” industries that no longer need subsidies.

The contradiction won’t fly with Iowa voters, said Matt Mohrfeld, the Democratic mayor of Fort Madison, which is home to a Siemens Gamesa wind turbine plant that employs about 300 people.

“It does break my heart to speak out against Marianne Miller-Meeks because she’s a friend, but on this one she was wrong and it’s going to be a crucial mistake,” Mohrfeld said. “I don’t know how anybody in good faith could vote against alternative energy if they’re elected by the people in Iowa. She will not be reelected.”

A poll commissioned in June by the Democratic House Majority PAC showed Miller-Meeks down by 4 points in a head-to-head matchup with her likely opponent next year, Democrat Christina Bohannan, although independent polling in the race is not yet widely available. Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up…”

And Trump’s attacks on wind have accelerated since the law passed, as the administration has taken aggressive actions to block and freeze major projects — including, just last week, a $1.5 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was nearly 80 percent complete…

Wright, a former fracking executive, has joined those attacks, arguing in an interview in Iowa with POLITICO that “the footprint and the visual impact” of wind farms are “so large” that wind has become “very unpopular for people that live near it.”

He’s also heightened the issue’s potential awkwardness for Miller-Meeks — saying in a recent Instagram post that the passage of the legislation to curb renewable incentives “wouldn’t have happened without [her] tireless leadership.”

Few states have embraced wind power the way Iowa has.

The Republican stronghold gets more of its electricity from wind than any other state. More than 50 companies are part of its wind industry, which has drawn $22 billion in total investments in the past three decades. Despite Trump’s and Wright’s claims that wind power makes electricity more expensive and unreliable, Iowa’s power costs are among the lowest in the nation and its grid is among the most stable…

Wind farms are the top taxpayer in a third of Iowa counties, contributing up to 55 percent of property taxes, and they provide $91.4 million in annual lease payments to farmers, according to Power Up Iowa, a coalition of renewable energy supporters that hosted an exhibit this month at the Iowa State Fair attended by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds…

Iowa attracted a surge of clean energy projects after the passage of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which contained hundreds of billions of dollars in federal tax breaks and other incentives.

In Miller-Meeks’ district alone, three large manufacturing plants — including Siemens Gamesa — produce blades for wind turbines…

Still, Richie Schmidt, president of Laborers Local 177 in Des Moines, said he expects a slowdown in energy-related construction work among his 5,000 union members in Iowa.

“When we’re forecasting manpower, we see a big push right now to whatever wind projects and solar projects were on the books, to get those things under construction,” Schmidt said. “But unfortunately, when this rush is done, we have a feeling it’s going to be really over.”