47.8% of Iowa's Queue Is Wind

Iowa's interconnection queue is Wind-first: 47.8% of its 228 filed projects are classified as Wind, according to our sealed grid-queue snapshot dated June 11, 2026. That 47.8% is the headline this post is built around. Iowa and Oklahoma are the only two Wind-majority states visible in the current covered dataset — the rest run Solar-first.

A queue entry is a request to connect, NOT a built, approved, or financed project. Iowa's own snapshot bears that out: 113 of its 228 projects — 49.6% — show as withdrawn. Half the history has already turned over. The still-active projects number 114, with 1 showing operational status.

This report covers generation and storage projects sitting in the interconnection queues of the U.S. grid operators (ISOs and RTOs) that publish a machine-readable queue, as captured by US Tech Automations' sealed daily grid snapshots. This is a census of the published queues, not of every project on every grid in the country.

Frequently Asked Questions

These questions come first because understanding the data's limits is prerequisite to reading the fuel mix, status split, and comparison table correctly.

Q: Does 47.8% Wind mean Iowa's grid is mostly wind-powered?

A: No. The queue represents requests to interconnect, not installed generation. Iowa already has substantial installed wind capacity; what appears in the queue is what developers have filed to study — most of which will not ultimately be built. A queue share reflects developer interest at the time of filing, not the actual generation mix.

Q: How should the 49.6% withdrawal rate be read?

A: It means roughly half of all projects ever filed in Iowa's MISO-linked queue have since been withdrawn by the developer. This is consistent with MISO's system-wide withdrawal rate of 56.2% — Iowa is actually below that average. Developers file multiple projects, study costs, and withdraw the ones that prove uneconomic. The withdrawal rate reflects queue dynamics, not a project-quality issue specific to Iowa.

Q: What does the median project size of 169 MW tell us?

A: Iowa's 169 MW median is notably higher than the national median of 150 MW and Wisconsin's 125 MW. That elevation reflects the prevalence of large Wind projects in Iowa's queue. Utility-scale wind turbines and wind farms typically propose capacities well above 100 MW, pulling the distribution upward relative to Solar-heavy queues where smaller distributed installations sometimes file.

Q: Are all 228 projects in MISO?

A: The display set records MISO as Iowa's primary ISO, with 225 of Iowa's projects in that footprint. A small number of projects may route through other covered ISOs; 225 is the MISO-reported count per this snapshot.

Q: What is the Duane Arnold 161 kV project?

A: Duane Arnold is the name of an existing nuclear facility in Iowa. The "161 kV" designation indicates a transmission interconnection point at that facility's substation voltage level. A filing at this point could relate to a new generation source connecting to the Duane Arnold 161 kV bus — the largest project at this location carries 646 MW of requested capacity. The fuel type of the filing is what the display set records under Nuclear for Iowa (5 Nuclear projects, 646 MW total).

Q: Is Iowa's Wind share unusual compared to neighboring MISO states?

A: Yes. Minnesota's queue is 44.4% Solar. Wisconsin's is 51.9% Solar. Illinois and Indiana are both Solar-majority. Iowa is the clear exception in the MISO Midwest tier, where Wind holds a plurality. That exception is rooted in Iowa's exceptional wind resource and its established developer community for wind projects — the fuel mix in any state's queue is a product of physical geography and developer economics, not policy alone.

Iowa's Queue at a Glance

228 projects hold 20.3 GW in Iowa's interconnection queue.

Iowa's median project size is 169 MW — above the national median of 150 MW.

109 Wind projects carry 10,946 MW — the largest capacity block in Iowa's queue.

The Fuel Mix: Walking Iowa's Queue Technology by Technology

Wind: 109 projects and 10,946 MW make Wind Iowa's dominant technology by both count and capacity. The capacity-per-project average for Wind is well above the state median — large wind farms routinely propose 200 MW to 500 MW in MISO's covered territory. A queue this Wind-heavy reflects the southern and western Iowa counties where Class 4–5 wind resources make utility development economical.

Solar: 61 projects at 5,836 MW place Solar second. Solar is expanding its share in Iowa even from a Wind-first baseline. These are typically mid-scale utility Solar arrays sited on agricultural land, and they generally connect at lower voltage levels than the largest Wind farms.

Battery Storage: 40 projects at 2,105 MW. Storage co-filed with Wind or Solar is increasingly common. In Iowa's wind-rich environment, storage is a dispatch tool — charging during high-wind, low-demand periods and dispatching during peak hours. The 2,105 MW from 40 projects averages roughly 50 MW per project, suggesting a mix of smaller standalone storage facilities and larger co-located systems.

Natural Gas: 7 projects at 566 MW. Modest by count and capacity, Iowa's gas queue reflects the peaker and reliability-backup role that gas continues to fill, even in a wind-dominant market. These are not large combined-cycle plants — the per-project average is below 100 MW.

Nuclear: 5 projects at 646 MW. Nuclear filings in an interconnection queue are rare. Iowa's 5 Nuclear entries at 646 MW are concentrated in the display set under the Duane Arnold 161 kV designation. These may represent restart or uprate filings at the Duane Arnold site, or new small modular reactor proposals that have entered the queue for feasibility study. The data does not specify project type.

Iowa's Nuclear presence in the queue — 5 projects at 646 MW — is an outlier worth noting. Nuclear rarely appears in state-level interconnection queues. That these filings exist is a data point; whether any will advance is not knowable from the queue alone.

How Iowa Compares Across the MISO Footprint

Iowa's 20.3 GW from 228 projects places it below Wisconsin (27.1 GW from 233) and Minnesota (22.2 GW from 277). Its per-project capacity average is slightly above Wisconsin's because of Wind's larger project sizes. Iowa is the sole MISO state in this comparison table with Wind as the dominant fuel — an unmistakable regional signature. The MISO interconnection queue report situates Iowa within its ISO footprint.

The 49.6% withdrawal rate sits between Minnesota's 56.3% and Wisconsin's 47.6%, consistent with MISO's 56.2% system average. None of these states is an outlier in either direction; MISO queue attrition runs at roughly half the filed history for states where the data is visible.

Iowa stands alone as the only Wind-majority queue in the MISO Midwest tier, at 47.8% Wind against neighbors running 44.4% to 51.9% Solar. The split traces to wind resource and developer economics, not policy.

Methodology and Scope

Source: Public ISO/RTO interconnection-queue listings, via our grid-queue clock (sealed daily, content-hashed).

Honesty statement: All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily grid-queue snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. Fuel and status labels are grouped from each ISO's own categories, and the grouping rules appear in the display set.

Fuel bucketing: Vendor fuel and technology labels differ by ISO and are grouped into Solar, Battery Storage, Wind, Natural Gas, Hybrid and Other by keyword.

Status bucketing: Each ISO publishes its own status taxonomy; statuses are grouped into withdrawn, operational (explicitly in-service or commercial operation), still-in-queue, and unknown for feeds that publish no status. Some ISOs drop withdrawn projects from their feed entirely.

The grid disclaimer: A queue position is a request to connect, not a built, approved, or financed project. Interconnection queues are aspirational. A large share of projects withdraw before construction. This report does not imply any project will be built, is coming online, or constitutes a forecast.

How the research desk seals the data:

1. Collect. ISO queue feeds are fetched daily from published machine-readable sources.

2. Normalize. Fuel and status labels are bucketed by keyword into canonical groupings.

3. Seal. A SHA hash of the normalized dataset is computed and stored immutably in an append-only log.

4. Aggregate. State- and ISO-level statistics are derived from the sealed records and expressed as display values.

This edition covers 5 ISOs and 28 states as of June 11, 2026.

Using Iowa's Grid Queue Data

Iowa's Wind-first queue creates clear use cases for three types of stakeholders. For national context across every covered ISO, see the USTA Interconnection Queue Index.

Wind energy developers siting a new Iowa project use the queue to assess where Wind filings are already dense. The 109 active-plus-withdrawn Wind projects represent a history of which transmission segments and substations developers have approached. Identifying clusters of Wind filings around specific 345 kV bus locations can indicate shared constraint points that a new filing would need to study.

Equipment suppliers and EPC contractors see 109 Wind projects at 10,946 MW as a multi-year forward indicator of Iowa turbine, foundation, and balance-of-plant procurement conversations. Projects in the still-in-queue half of Iowa's history that survive cost studies become buyers. Suppliers that track which projects pass feasibility studies can prioritize sales development accordingly.

Utilities and policy researchers monitoring Iowa's energy transition use the queue as a leading indicator of developer sentiment. A Wind-heavy queue in 2026 says that developers continue to see Iowa as a Wind development market, even as Solar is growing its share with 61 projects filed.

The research desk provides automated queue monitoring — daily ingestion, status-change detection, and alert routing — so teams do not need to manually pull and reconcile MISO queue spreadsheets. The wind interconnection queue report covers Wind's national queue position in depth.

The queue data's value multiplies when teams can act on it quickly. A Wind project that advances from feasibility study to system impact study is a developer who has passed a major cost checkpoint — worth knowing the same day MISO publishes the update, not the next time someone pulls the spreadsheet. US Tech Automations builds workflows that ingest MISO's daily feed, detect status changes at the project level, and route alerts to the relevant team members automatically. That means procurement and sales conversations can start when the signal is fresh rather than days after the data moved.

Automate your grid queue monitoring at /platform/agentic-workflows.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from the sealed daily interconnection-queue snapshot, June 11, 2026.