Full Title: A Clean Energy Future for MidAmerican and Iowa
Author(s): Devi Glick, Philip Eash-Gates, Jamie Hall, and Andrew Takasugi
Publisher(s): Synapse
Publication Date: December 15, 2021
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Iowa has some of the best wind resources in the country, with 57 percent of the state’s generation coming from wind in 2020. Despite this abundant, clean, renewable, and cost-effective wind resource, utilities in the region continue to also rely heavily on costly and aging coal-burning generation resources and invest minimally in energy efficiency and demand-side management programs. MidAmerican Energy Company (MidAmerican or the Company) provides electricity to approximately 42 percent of the 1.7 million electric customers in the state of Iowa. The Company has invested substantially in wind resources, but still relies heavily on coal, with nearly half of the Company’s firm capacity coming from its coal resources.
In May of this year (2021), the Iowa Utilities Board (the Board) opened a docket (Docket No. SPU-2021- 0003) to review MidAmerican’s “current generating fleet and how it meets the needs of MidAmerican’s customers.” The review is to include potential retirement of its coal plants and provide a “least-cost analysis addressing options considered to meet its long-term resource needs.” This action resulted from an order issued by the Board in a prior docket (Docket No. EPB-2020-0156) deferring consideration of coal plant economics and resource planning issues to a future docket. Although the Company has designated most of its resource information and analysis as confidential (and it is therefore unavailable to the public or any intervenors), and presented no standard capacity expansion planning modeling, as we would expect in response to the Board’s directive, this docket has at least provided a venue to review the Company’s current resource mix and to ask the question, “what is the least-cost portfolio to serve MidAmerican customers in Iowa over the next two decades?”
It is in this context that Synapse conducted the analysis included in this report, prepared on behalf of Sierra Club, Iowa Environmental Council, and the Environmental Law and Policy Center. The purpose of the analysis is to (1) evaluate the cost to retire MidAmerican’s coal fleet by 2030, and replace the energy and capacity with renewables, battery storage, and energy efficiency, and (2) determine whether retiring and replacing MidAmerican’s coal fleet with clean energy is a lower-cost option for Iowa ratepayers than continuing to operate the plants through their currently planned retirement dates.