Is Iowa’s electric grid ready for the demands of the future?

You’re glad you went home early — the roads were flooded with rainwater and it’s only gotten worse since. You hear the wind whipping across your yard and see trees thrash, some losing their branches in their fight against the wind. The lights flicker. You wonder: are you going to lose power?

The strength of the electric grid — the network of transmission lines and generators that bring electricity to your house — determines whether your lights turn on when you flick the switch. The electric grid, often called “the grid” for short, is built to withstand a certain amount of equipment failure and storm damage. However, extreme weather fueled by climate change is putting increasing pressure on the grid.

A curious Iowa reader asked The Gazette how reliable the Midwest’s electrical grid is, whether it’s ready to handle climate challenges and how much the government has invested in upgrades. Curious Iowa — a series from The Gazette that answers readers questions about the state and how it works — spoke with three energy experts to learn how the grid works, how it’s improved and how climate change is expected to impact it.

How does the electric grid give us energy?

The grid has two key components: power sources and transmission lines. Solar farms, coal- and gas-powered plants and other forms of energy generate electricity that then travels to its destination through a system of power lines.

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To keep things running smoothly, Mike Deising, executive director of strategic communications at Midcontinent Independent System Operator Inc., said the grid is “designed on redundancy.” Backups and backups for the backups are built in to accommodate for accidents and maintenance. Deising said it’s common for transmission lines to be out of commission for repairs or for power plants to go offline for multiple months for maintenance.

“That happens every day, all the time, in real time, and no one even knows about it, because that's just how the system's built,” he said.

Utilities are the ones responsible for this continuous availability of electricity. They make sure there’s enough power generated for all of their customers and that there’s a way for it to get to all of their customers. It’s a balance. Utilities have to have enough energy generated in case there are any sudden spikes in demand, but with minimal excess.

Utilities operate on the local level. If a tree knocks out a power line, that’s their jurisdiction. But the electric grid isn’t limited to your neighborhood or even your county — it stretches across state lines.

That’s where Midcontinent Independent System Operator Inc., or MISO comes in. Unlike utilities, MISO doesn’t sell energy. Instead, it works with energy companies across 15 states to coordinate the grid, making sure each has all of the energy it needs to meet customer demand.

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“You can think of us as the air traffic controller of the power system for those 15 states,” Deising said. “We don't own power plants, we don't own transmission lines, but we are the air traffic controllers that make sure that those planes go from point A to point B.”

MISO steps in when there’s a discrepancy between one area’s energy demand and another’s energy generation. It’s not that an electron created in Minnesota will travel all the way to Arkansas, per se. It’s more like books being shifted down to fill a gap on the shelf, a bit of extra power pushed from one state to another until it reaches the area that needs it.

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What does it mean for an electric grid to be reliable?

Simply put, a reliable grid is one in which you can reasonably expect the lights to turn on when you flip a switch. That means there’s enough power being generated to meet demand and that all those backups for potential problems are in place.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has dozens of standards outlining how a reliable grid should function. NERC’s guidelines account for multiple contingencies, outlining how many parts of the grid need to stay operational in a given scenario.

James McCalley, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Iowa State University, said NERC’s standards are “the Bible” of grid planners and operators. But, he said, grid operators have to take resilience — the grid’s ability to withstand extreme events — into consideration as well. Invest too much, however, and electricity becomes unaffordable.

“The cost of energy reflects the level of investment that is made,” McCalley said. “You could overbuild your system, and if you did that, it would be more reliable, but it would then result in a higher cost of energy, so that there's a balance there that we have to maintain.”

So how well is Iowa maintaining that balance? McCalley pointed to NERC’s 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment, which found MISO comfortably exceeded the minimum reliability threshold. Both MISO and the state are “reasonably reliable,” McCalley said.

How will climate change affect Iowa’s electric grid?

As the planet warms, it disrupts long-standing patterns in the way weather systems operate. Iowa is especially vulnerable to drought, flooding and temperature swings that climate change worsens. This has direct implications for the grid. According to Climate Central, a climate communication nonprofit, 80 percent of major power outages in the U.S. from 2000 to 2023 were weather-related.

On the energy generation side, Steve Guyer, senior energy policy counsel at the Iowa Environmental Council, said warmer weather means less efficient energy production. Plus, droughts can deplete water resources needed to cool coal plants, putting them out of operation in dry periods.

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Energy delivery, on the other hand, also needs to be prepared for more extreme conditions. Guyer said power lines in Iowa are currently designed to withstand 120 mph winds, but upgrading the lines would take significant investment.

“I don't think we're quite there yet,” Guyer said. “You would have to see something increase dramatically in terms of the frequency and the severity of storms and wind speeds before I would basically then move to a higher wind category.”

Finally, climate change is expected to increase energy demand. Deising said MISO has to pay close attention to major temperature swings. When it gets very hot, people tend to turn up the AC. Same deal when it gets cold — people tend to turn up the heat.

This is when MISO’s extensive network really comes in handy. If a heat wave is sweeping Louisiana but isn’t being felt in Iowa, MISO can shift energy being generated in Iowa across multiple states so that Louisiana can meet the demand caused by the heat wave.

“We have meteorologists now at MISO, something we did not have 15 years ago,” Deising said. “What happens with the weather now, its impacts on the power system are more significant than they were 15 years ago.”

The meteorology team helps MISO plan for these events, watching temperature, projected wind speeds and the amount of cloud cover. These predictions also help MISO decide what power sources to use at a given time — if dark clouds are expected to linger above a solar farm, it could make more sense to draw from a natural gas plant until the clouds pass.

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Is Iowa’s electric grid ready for the future?

Although there are state and federal grants available to update grid infrastructure, McCalley said a significant amount of the money for improving the grid comes from consumers.

In addition to the funds that come out of your electric bill, McCalley said different types of grid owners have ways of bringing in additional revenue. In Ames, where McCalley lives, the grid is run by the city and has access to taxpayer money if a major project is necessary. Utilities can get money from shareholder investments and cooperatives get support from federal grants and loans.

Guyer said he hasn’t seen much conversation about climate and the grid, but mostly because questions around increasing demand have eclipsed the conversation. Data centers are one factor — large ones can use as much energy as a small city. Deising said a broader societal push toward electrification — in cars and heating units, for example — is another.

For his part, McCalley said he feels “very positive” about the electric industry’s capacity to deal with rising demand.

“If indeed it grows at the rate that a lot of people are expecting … then we certainly have a job to do,” McCalley said. “But we're on it. The industry is very much aware and thinking about it and working on it.”

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Fern Alling covers health care for The Gazette.

Comments: fern.alling@thegazette.com