It’s Friday, January 15, and Des Moines has adopted the most ambitious city-level climate goal in the nation.
Most people wouldn’t think of Des Moines as a hotbed for action on global warming — but this week, the Iowa capital announced the most ambitious climate goals of any city in the country. According to a resolution passed by the Des Moines City Council on Monday, the city hopes to be powered by 100 percent, 24/7 clean energy by 2035.
Other cities have set goals to run on 100 percent renewable or clean energy, but those targets aren’t always what they seem. Most cities just do a kind of balancing act, purchasing an amount of wind or solar electricity equivalent to the power they use in the course of a year. But when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, many of those cities still pull power from fossil fuels.
Des Moines’s goal is to have clean electricity on the grid all the time, meaning the city will have to invest in batteries to store energy from renewable sources and then feed it back into the grid as needed. (The only other entity with a similar goal is Google, which has promised to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030.) The city’s utility, MidAmerican Energy, is on board with the goal and plans to work closely with the city over the next decade and a half.
The new plan “allows Des Moines to lead not just in Iowa but I think it gives us a place in national leadership,” City Councilman Josh Mandelbaum told the Des Moines Register.
The Smog
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