That paragon is none other than Iowa, which in 2023 generated roughly 61 percent of its electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic power (but mostly wind). A close runner-up is even deeper-red South Dakota, which went 63 percent for Trump in the latest election. Almost 56 percent of its electricity in 2023 was generated by wind turbines, which Trump has incorrectly claimed cause cancer.
The two states stood out in a recent report by the clean-energy think tank RMI, which divided the U.S., Europe and China into states, countries and provinces to highlight how some are switching to renewables much faster than others.
The idea is that these places are showing the others that the transition doesn’t have to be expensive or scary or even constrained by politics. If other territories merely catch up to these leaders, then cleantech deployment will at least triple, pushing the world closer to its goals for slashing greenhouse-gas emissions and limiting global heating to less-than-catastrophic levels.
Europe beats the U.S. and China in the sheer number of territories RMI calls “global leaders” of the green revolution, or those generating more than 30 percent of their electricity from wind and solar. Denmark led the world with 67 percent of its electricity generated that way in 2023, according to RMI. But Iowa was the world’s second-leading territory, and South Dakota placed third. Several other U.S. states were also among the global leaders, including New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, California, Vermont, Colorado and North Dakota — covering pretty much all of the U.S. political spectrum.
For sheer volume of renewable power, no state beats deep-red Texas, which generated nearly 120 million megawatt-hours of electricity from wind alone in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That nearly matches the power generated by all sources in New York — a reliable blue state that derives less than 10 percent of its energy from wind and solar, placing it just barely above the global “laggards,” in RMI’s judgment. But Texas is also an energy-hungry state, and just 28 percent of its power comes from wind and solar, leaving it shy of the leaders.
The political vibe in these states isn’t exactly open to environmentalist arguments for clean energy. In fossil-fuel-rich Texas, some politicians are downright hostile to renewables. Now that Trump is heading back to the White House, with Republicans in full control of government, the national mood might seem to be turning against cleantech.
But not only are red states among the leaders in rolling out clean energy, red districts are also the biggest recipients of the Inflation Reduction Act’s financial incentives for renewable projects, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning has noted, getting nearly four times as much investment as blue districts. Republican politicians may win votes by calling climate change a Chinese hoax, but they sure won’t lose any votes by attracting billions of dollars to their districts.
That’s not to say the transition is frictionless or cheap everywhere. Citizens of renewable-friendly California pay the second-highest electric bills in the country after Hawaii despite having so much wind and solar energy. That’s mainly because utilities are investing so much to harden the state’s grid against wildfires that have grown more intense as the planet warms. But it’s also a side effect of trying to prepare the system for an electrification wave that will strain the grid even more. Switching to variable energy sources also requires building batteries to store electrons for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Still, there’s no reason the cleantech laggards can’t eventually catch up to the leaders. RMI estimates every U.S. state has the theoretical potential to generate enough renewable power to meet its energy demands. While Iowa is a wind leader, it’s barely taking advantage of all its sunshine, for example. New Jersey is badly lagging in all of the above. Everybody merely playing catch-up would boost deployment nearly fourfold in the U.S. and nearly threefold in Europe and China, RMI estimates. That would help put all three regions on track to generate half their electricity from wind and solar by 2035.
RMI argues that clean power adoption is following the sort of S-shaped curve you see with other nascent technology, like microwaves and the internet. As messy and slow as the transition has been so far, there’s no evidence yet to suggest RMI is wrong. And if cleantech can overcome bitter U.S. politics, then it can do just about anything.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Bloomberg L.P. editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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