President Trump signed his Energy Independence Executive Order today.
It clearcuts through a swath of environmental regulations,
including President Obama’s Clean Power Plan,
which rewarded states that invested in renewable energies like wind power.
— With today’s executive action, I am taking historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy,
to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations.
— But the state that wagered the most on wind turbines wasn’t California or Vermont.
It was Iowa.
And that bet has paid off in the form of a powerful local industry
that won’t take kindly to Trump’s threats against it.
— Newton, Iowa is a small town of 15,000 people, located about 30 miles east of Des Moines.
In 2007, the wind blade manufacturer TPI Composites set up shop in Newton,
bringing 500 new jobs along with it.
— Did you always expect that you’d end up working in a place that makes blades for wind turbines?
— Nope.
Didn’t really even know it was a thing, until about nine years ago, when I started.
My dad worked at Maytag for 26 years, and he raised his family with that company.
And now, I feel like I’m raising my family with this company.
— Starting in the early 1900s, Newton was home to the Maytag washing machine company,
which employed around 3,000 people in its heyday.
But Maytag moved its factory to Mexico in 2007,
causing many in Newton to lose their livelihoods and, along with it,
a sense of what the town’s future held.
Newton’s story isn’t an isolated case, either.
Throughout the American heartland, wind jobs are on the rise.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
wind turbine technician is the fastest growing job in the U.S.,
and most of those jobs are found in agricultural places, like this.
— Throughout much of the Midwest,
the Wind Belt runs from Texas up through the Dakotas.
And Iowa, strategically, is a great location to develop and logistically maneuver
and distribute blades to various locations throughout that midwestern Wind Belt.
Four out of the top five states are actually located throughout the Midwest,
in traditionally red districts and Republican communities.
Much of this comes in rural areas,
you wouldn’t expect to see wind fans in suburban areas or metropolitan areas,
because there’s other obstructions to the wind.
— But none of this economic success seems to have had any impact on the politics.
President Trump won Iowa by 10%,
and yet, he railed on the wind industry on the campaign trail:
— ...and I wouldn’t exactly say it makes your farmlands look beautiful,
you’ve got all these windmills all over the place, going…
driving you loco when you look at them, right?
— Such rhetoric can make the future of renewables seem tenuous, but it wasn’t always this way.
Chuck Grassley has represented Iowa in the Senate for over 30 years,
and he remembers when renewable energy wasn’t so politically divisive.
— When this got started 30 years ago, it wasn’t Republicans or Democrats,
we were running out of fossil fuels.
— Right.
— The frame of mind was that we gotta do all we can to be energy independent.
So that’s where you dealt with every sort of alternative energy you can think of,
and a tax incentive for it.
Some of those tax incentives still exist.
— In 1992, Grassley sponsored the Production Tax Credit,
which cut costs for wind energy companies and gave them the momentum they needed
to install more than 50,000 turbines across the U.S.
The credit is scheduled to be phased out in 2020,
though some are concerned that the current administration will attempt to accelerate that timeline.
When tax credits for renewables expired in the past,
construction of new installations dropped by up to 93%,
and an industry-funded study projects that, if the credit disappears again,
37,000 jobs could be lost.
— You know, you’ve mentioned President Trump.
Prior to his election, you were quoted as saying that,
if he ever attacked the wind industry, he would do so over your dead body.
Do you still feel the same way now?
— Anybody that wants to cut short the phaseout of wind energy, which will happen in 2020,
let’s say they wanna get rambunctious and do it in 2017, ‘18, or ‘19.
I think we can stop that.
And I said it would be over my dead body, I guess it’s over my dead body.