Solar Catches on in Iowa

By Karen Uhlenhuth

Decem­ber 18, 2013

Mid­west Ener­gy News

Iowa is well estab­lished as a nation­al leader in wind ener­gy and bio­fu­els. And now the state is poised for seri­ous growth in solar as well.

“The mar­ket is explod­ing in Iowa,” says Tim Dwight, a for­mer Iowa Hawk­eye and NFL star who has become one of his home state’s most vis­i­ble solar ener­gy advocates.

Home­own­ers, farm­ers, busi­ness­es and at least one school dis­trict in Iowa are going solar. Also, over the past year, sev­er­al munic­i­pal util­i­ties and rur­al elec­tric co-ops have put up solar arrays, invit­ing cus­tomers to buy a share of the pow­er generated.

“Solar growth in Iowa is where wind was in the first decade of the 2000s,” says Bill Haman of  the Iowa Ener­gy Cen­ter. “We saw an explo­sion in wind.”

In Fry­town, just out­side Iowa City, the Farm­ers Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive has been steadi­ly adding on to a com­mu­ni­ty solar project estab­lished on its prop­er­ty in 2011. And a few weeks ago, the co-op announced plans to put togeth­er a 750-kilo­watt solar farm, which would be the largest solar-ener­gy project in the state. It’s pro­ject­ed to meet about 15 per­cent of the co-op’s demand for power.

In Sep­tem­ber, the Iowa Asso­ci­a­tion of Munic­i­pal Util­i­ties put an 18-kilo­watt array on the roofs of sev­er­al build­ings at its head­quar­ters in Ankeny.

And in Novem­ber, sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tions snagged a $1 mil­lion grant from the Depart­ment of Ener­gy to stream­line local per­mit­ting and zon­ing codes, and improve stan­dards for con­nect­ing solar gen­er­a­tion to the grid. The aim: to cut the time and costs of adding solar gen­er­a­tion. State law­mak­ers who attend­ed a recent solar tour have pledged to help.

Incentives high, costs low

Iowa’s solar capac­i­ty remains a tiny frac­tion of its over­all ener­gy mix — at the end of 2012 the state had only about 1 MW of solar installed com­pared to more than 5,000 MW of wind.

But the same mar­ket forces dri­ving solar growth in oth­er parts of the coun­try are being felt in the heart­land, too.

The biggest fac­tor dri­ving all of the fire­works, accord­ing to Haman, not sur­pris­ing­ly, is money.

“Incen­tives are at an all-time high, and costs are at an all-time low,” he said. The cost per watt is between $3 and $3.50 now, com­pared with a range of about $7 to $10 sev­er­al years ago.

Sys­tems typ­i­cal­ly pay for them­selves with­in a decade now, giv­en fed­er­al and state tax cred­its and, in much of cen­tral and east­ern Iowa, a sub­sidy avail­able to cus­tomers of Alliant Ener­gy. A decade ago, Haman said, recoup­ing the costs of a solar instal­la­tion could take 30 to 50 years.

Haman says mon­ey is not the only fac­tor, though. He said Iowans have been wak­ing up to solar pow­er – an obser­va­tion shared by War­ren McKen­na, the gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Farm­ers Elec­tric Co-op.

Find­ing him­self on sort of a solar-ener­gy lec­ture cir­cuit of late, McKen­na gets to lis­ten to lots of peo­ple. And he says they’ve been tak­ing notice of solar pan­els in oth­er places – Min­neso­ta, Col­orado, Cal­i­for­nia — and have been press­ing their util­i­ties to get on board.

Traer Munic­i­pal Util­i­ties installed a 40-kilo­watt com­mu­ni­ty solar project a few months ago, said man­ag­er Pat Stief. All 106 pan­els have been pur­chased by 42 cus­tomers. They paid $530 per pan­el, rat­ed at 305 watts, and will see a cred­it on their month­ly bill for 20 years.

The Hawk­eye Rur­al Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive in north­east Iowa intends to put 25 kilo­watts of pan­els on its prop­er­ty in Cresco, and also will invite mem­bers to invest in a share of the pow­er. Ted Kjos, man­ag­er of mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, is look­ing ahead to a pos­si­ble sec­ond phase.

“We’ve done a sur­vey of our mem­ber­ship. A sig­nif­i­cant amount of our mem­ber­ship is inter­est­ed in the co-op pro­vid­ing this,” he said.

Utility incentives coming to an end

Solar in Iowa has got­ten prob­a­bly its great­est sin­gle boost from Alliant Ener­gy. In 2008, when Alliant put togeth­er its effi­cien­cy plan, designed to out­line effi­cien­cy efforts through 2013, it pro­posed to sub­si­dize small, on-site renew­able ener­gy projects.

For the first few years, there were very few tak­ers. But the story’s changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the past year.

Haman, from the Iowa Ener­gy Cen­ter, man­ages a state revolv­ing loan fund that pro­vides inter­est-free mon­ey to help peo­ple pay the upfront costs of installing renew­able ener­gy sys­tems at their homes or businesses.

He said there’s been “a steep rise” this year in the num­ber of peo­ple seek­ing loans for solar panels.

“They’ve all come in in this past quar­ter,” he said, and near­ly all of them – at least 40 out of 45 solar projects that have been processed – are from with­in the Alliant territory.

Installer Michele Wei con­curs that there’s been a mad dash of late.

Her busi­ness with Alliant picked up a lit­tle steam in 2012, but this year, she said, “It was like, ‘Oh boy – it’s ending!’”

The Dec­o­rah Com­mu­ni­ty School Dis­trict, inter­est­ed in putting pan­els atop sev­er­al schools, has scur­ried to get its appli­ca­tion in before the pro­gram expires. Super­in­ten­dent Michael Halus­ka said the dis­trict will start small – prob­a­bly about 24 kilo­watts atop three or four schools.

It would be just enough to “max out the Alliant rebate,” he said. “We don’t want to lose the oppor­tu­ni­ty for that rebate.”

And while there’s noth­ing like a dead­line to orga­nize the mind, sev­er­al peo­ple famil­iar with solar mat­ters in Iowa said that Alliant Ener­gy could – and should – have made a greater effort to pub­li­cize the sub­sidy for on-site renew­ables, which it will be ter­mi­nat­ing as of Dec. 31. The util­i­ty claimed that not many peo­ple were tak­ing advan­tage of it.

Haman sug­gest­ed that might have been because Alliant’s effort to pub­li­cize it “wasn’t a very aggres­sive mar­ket­ing campaign.”

Wei went a bit fur­ther, char­ac­ter­iz­ing the solar rebate as a “best-kept secret. If you don’t go on their web site, you don’t know about it.”

Jen­nifer Easler, an attor­ney with the Iowa Office of Con­sumer Advo­cate, said that an out­side com­mit­tee con­vened to review Alliant’s effi­cien­cy pro­grams rec­om­mend­ed “a stronger out­reach effort.”

Justin Foss, a spokesman for Alliant Ener­gy, said that the com­pa­ny rou­tine­ly informs cus­tomers of effi­cien­cy ben­e­fits, like the on-site solar rebate, through arti­cles in a com­pa­ny newslet­ter that goes out with month­ly bills.

The net­work of solar deal­ers work­ing in the state is “the best col­lec­tion point” for get­ting such infor­ma­tion out, he said.

But when Alliant has changed pro­ce­dures and moved up dead­lines, Wei said, the util­i­ty has failed to keep installers up to date.

“There’s a lack of knowl­edge that the rebate is out there,” said Dwight, who is pres­i­dent of the Iowa Solar Ener­gy Trade Asso­ci­a­tion. “There’s not very strong advo­ca­cy of solar from the util­i­ties. They don’t do a good job of edu­cat­ing customers.”

Mean­while, busi­ness remains brisk for installers like Wei.

“We (installed) sev­en sys­tems in the last month,” she said. “That’s def­i­nite­ly much more than we did last year. Since April or May, we’ve been installing nonstop.”