Increasing demand for electricity, aging infrastructure and managing diverse power sources are a few of the energy sector challenges in Iowa. The Iowa Utilities Commission reviews all these issues and more for residents and businesses, to ensure reliable and affordable service. The chair of the three-member commission is Sarah Martz, who was appointed in May by Gov. Kim Reynolds. She replaced Erik Helland, who had served as chair since 2023 and remains on the commission. 

A longtime utility professional, Martz has served as an IUC commissioner since 2023 and previously worked for 11 years at Alliant Energy-Interstate Power and Light, where she worked to improve power plants, researched solar performance and piloted new technologies such as energy storage. Trained as an engineer, she grew up in Rochester, Minn., and attended Iowa State University, where she joined the solar car team and played the clarinet in the marching band. 

Martz serves on a number of committees and working groups at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, including the Committee on Energy Resources and the Environment and the State Working Groups on Transmission and Performance-Based Regulation. She was also appointed to the Federal and State Current Issues Collaborative, led by the association and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, through August 2026, which will give Iowa a voice in federal-state regulator coordination. Earlier this month, she was named to the Iowa Nuclear Energy Task Force established by Reynolds. 

We sat down with Martz to learn more about her, her work and the issues facing the commission.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What got you interested in engineering? 

I excelled at science and math and got into the Science Olympiad teams and things like that. Actually, I don’t even think I really understood what engineering was until later in high school. But then, once I was looking for colleges, I started looking to engineering, No. 1, just because of the science and math interest. But I was really interested in energy from an early age. I knew that I wanted to be in the energy industry and that’s how I picked mechanical engineering as my major because that’s the engineering discipline that deals with energy. Mechanical engineering is really broad; it can mean anything from designing gears to designing a power plant, or converting heat energy to electric energy. That’s why I picked that area.

I think I was interested in conservation in general and green energy, like zero emission energy. One of the things I had researched before I chose Iowa State was that they had a solar car team; it’s a club that designs and builds a solar car, and I was like, ‘I’m going to do that.’ So I joined the solar car team at Iowa State, and ended up being the project lead by my junior year and led that team, and that’s actually where I met my husband, too. 

What did you pursue next in your career?

I got my degree from Iowa State, and then I considered going straight into the workforce. It was 2009; it wasn’t a great job market and I had been considering going for a master’s degree to specialize in more of an energy field. I had done some research on fuel cell energy generation and was interested in this program at University of California, Irvine, so I had gone out there for a visit and tried to determine if that was the right move. I had actually interviewed at a different utility and had a job offer and decided, ‘No, I’m going to go do this grad school thing, because if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it.’

My husband and I were engaged at that point. We moved out to California and completed my master’s program at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UCI. I did research on fuel cells and combined heat and power systems, and that’s what my thesis was on. 

After grad school, you started working at Alliant Energy. How was that experience?

I worked in Ottumwa for four years at a coal-fired power plant, and that was an amazing experience; there was so much learning in a short amount of time for a person who didn’t have a lot of hands-on experience, and to go from getting a degree to going into the real world and seeing how things actually work and how much work it takes to keep these things maintained and to operate them, and work a lot alongside those people. 

I worked at the power plant while there were a lot of upgrades going on, and it packed a lot of learning into a short amount of time. Then after about four years, I moved to Madison [Wis.], did some work with different types of power plants: gas plants, solar generation, battery generation, distributed resources and increased that breadth of knowledge. I also started to get experience with the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which is the grid operator for most of Iowa. That’s the air traffic controller for electricity across the state, and started to learn and get that bigger context of how the grid works there.

Then at one point, I transferred back to Ames and worked with the electric distribution side of things and managed a team of engineers who were tasked with designing and maintaining the electric distribution system, the lines that bring power to your home and businesses. 

When I was living in Ames, I decided that it’s time for a change, and had been looking for other opportunities to broaden my experience, and maybe find new ways to make an impact. A position at Iowa State had come up for director of engineering for their utility group, and I applied for that and was hired. That involved the overall management over the utility distribution system on Iowa State’s campus, which a lot of people don’t realize [that] a lot of college campuses have their own utilities. Back when these campuses were built, it just made more sense for them to have a central power plant and to handle heating and cooling on a campus-wide basis, rather than piece by piece. Iowa State has steam tunnels, and they have cooling pipes that go all through campus. There’s management of all those systems, and that was my first experience with more of a state government entity rather than private. 

But my time there was very brief; I think it was five or six months before I got the call from the governor’s office asking if I was interested in a potential opening on the Iowa Utilities Board and I said ‘yes.’ I had been thinking about taking on more of a public service role for awhile, and had been educating myself more on things like the Utilities Board. 

Can you talk about your role on the commission and how it affects the business community?

Here we have a multi-faceted role. There are different areas that we cover. But I’ll start with maybe the one that most people think of is we regulate the investor-owned utilities in the state; that includes gas, electric and water investor-owned utilities. The reason why there’s regulation of the rates of those companies is because they are monopolies. 

The state has given them the ability to have monopoly service over those utilities, and there’s no market to maintain competitive pricing. The commission’s role is to be a stand-in for the market and make sure that business decisions don’t deviate too much from what they would be in a competitive market. 

We conduct rate cases. Utilities can’t increase their rates without asking us and having a rate case proceeding; those take about 10 months to go through. It’s a very involved process of testimony and replies and questions and data requests to make that decision. 

Electric utilities in the state have the ability to come in on certain types of generation to request approval in advance of putting in renewable generation. We determine the cost recovery of that in advance for utilities in some cases. We also have a big role in terms of linear infrastructure siting. Transmission-line siting, pipeline siting, is under our jurisdiction. 

The Legislature has given us the authority to grant eminent domain, in some instances, for that type of infrastructure. We also have an entire team in the building called safety and engineering. We have engineers and inspectors on pipeline and electric teams. Our inspectors, usually we don’t see them a lot here in the office because they’re on the road, constantly inspecting pipelines and electric transmission lines on a rolling basis to make sure utilities are following safety rules and maintaining safe facilities.

The overarching goal of the commission is to make sure that we have affordable, reliable and safe utility service for all Iowans, and that’s always a balancing act. We have to make sure utilities are financially healthy, because if they’re not financially healthy, they can’t serve customers. We have to make sure they’re investing in their systems so that they’re reliable and safe, and then we have to make sure that people can actually pay the rates that they’re charged, so that’s always a balancing act on our part. 

When rates increase – residential, commercial, industrial –  are those rates and increases pretty similar?

It depends. In a rate case, the utility will come in and propose different rate classes, and typically that will involve different rate structures for very large industrial plants, commercial and medium-sized businesses, and residential. What most states do and what Iowa does, as well, is those rate classes are meant to be structured on a cost causation basis. 

If residential customers cause this percent of the total cost of the utility, that’s what should be allocated to that class; same with commercial and industrial. That’s usually a big conversation in our rate cases, between us, between the utility and between any intervener that decides to participate.

What would you say are some of the biggest issues that the commission is addressing right now?

I would say that overall, the utility environment is a whirlwind right now. We’re trying to keep up and stay informed enough that we’re making really good decisions in light of this. You have a ton of load growth from onshoring, from electrification, from AI data centers. You have aging infrastructure that needs to be replaced. You have a change in the mix of generation from centralized, large power plants to a larger percentage of renewables. All of this intersects to create this massive need for more investment in the grid, and I think we need to do a better job of educating stakeholders in the public about how big of a deal that is and how we’re going to start seeing more of that; more transmission lines, more new transmission lines to make sure the grid is efficient and reliable, more new power plants to make sure that we have renewable or reliable power whenever we need it. That includes some renewables, and it includes some fuel resources. 

A lot of the new power plants that are being planned right now that are not renewables are fueled with gas, and the gas system needs to grow, too, to accommodate that. Then, of course, all these things need water. AI data centers need water. Power plants need water. Emission standards get tighter, and you need to clean up the water. It affects all of our utilities right now. 

You have billions of dollars of investment that are needed, and I see our role as making sure we’re asking all the right questions when those things come through and advocating for the best path forward. 

The tricky part right now, it happens every once in a while, is you get into the situation where you need so much more infrastructure, and you need it fast, and when you need stuff fast, and when you’re rushing, good decision-making can sometimes falter. But we need to maintain all these things. 

We need to move fast to maintain a stable grid. We also need to make sure we’re asking the good questions, if that decision doesn’t look like the best one, or if that investment didn’t look like the most prudent, and that’s how we usher Iowa through. We put in the infrastructure we needed to be prosperous, to be reliable, to be open for business. But we haven’t done it in a sloppy way that costs are out of control, or that’s not as reliable as we need it. That’s the balancing act we’re at today.

Some say that Iowa’s energy costs and capacity are attractive to businesses moving to the state. What are your thoughts on that? When it comes to energy resources such as wind turbines, do those help fill the gaps when you talk about needing more energy infrastructure?

This is a nationwide challenge, it’s not specific to Iowa right now. If you follow the RTOs [regional transmission organizations] at all and groups like that, you’ll see that they all are saying, ‘We’ve had an extra margin or buffer room in a lot of regions for years, decades, where we’ve had additional generation.’ For decades, we had no load growth. We had flat load growth, and that was a lot due to energy efficiency, things getting more efficient. Even if you added a business here and there, the load would stay the same.

We’re getting to the point where now we’ve got large energy users coming online or going to states and saying, ‘Hey, I need your power’ and that excess has been used up. Any state you go to will have this conversation. It’s not, ‘Yes, I have access for you today.’ It’s, ‘How fast can I build it for you?’ The states that are able to build it the most efficiently and quickly are the ones winning those businesses now, assuming it’s a large, 25-megawatt-plus business. 

These data centers that are 600 megawatts, that’s a whole power plant. That can be even more than a power plant. What utilities across the country are saying to these customers now is, ‘OK, tell me what your plans are, and we will work with you on a timeline of when I can get the facilities ready and when I can serve you reliably and not affect the rest of my customers.’ That’s where pretty much every state is. I’d say the states that are getting the most AI attention are the ones who are able to offer the shorter timelines and the better rates. 

How much of that is due to AI? Are there other entities with large energy loads besides the data centers?

We’ve seen some interest in onshoring of manufacturing facilities that had previously been offshored. There’s the electrification aspect, where a company has decided to go from natural gas powering something to electric and that can cause an increase in that electricity need.

Then there are electric vehicles. If an Amazon fleet is now electrified, that also contributes. 

AI is definitely a significant driver right now of load forecasts. With any emerging industry such as this one, there’s just a lot of uncertainty in the forecast, too. We don’t know if it’s going to be a 5% or 20% increase, and those are just made up numbers, but there’s just a wide bandwidth of what we could be accommodating in the future.

How do you manage that uncertainty? 

The utilities, day to day, are making these business decisions and working with customers to see how this is going to work. We do have tariffs that the utilities have approved in front of us that put some additional guardrails on those large customers. 

A lot of utilities are coming out with new tariffs that are specifically tailored toward these ultra-large customers, and they put more guardrails in place. Maybe there’s annual reporting on how things are going, how much is the customer paying, versus what was their cost to serve. If they said, ‘I’m going to use 100 megawatts by this date,’ did they really get there? Because if the utility invests in all that infrastructure and then the customer never uses that amount of power, it could be what we call stranded investment. 

The utility spent the money, but it’s not getting used, so they’re not getting the payback on it. That’s another one of those balancing acts and the utility makes these business decisions. On the back end, if the utilities come in for a rate case, we have to look at those costs and incomes and say, ‘OK, you charged this customer this much, but the cost was actually this much.’ And how do we reconcile those things? We have had a lot of conversations with our utilities about data center growth and trying to understand the decision-making that they have. We go to conferences, we talk with other commissions. We try to get educated on the best practices for accommodating new loads but not putting customers at too much risk. 

Any other big issues facing the commission?

For me, a lot of it centers around that, that big, interconnected challenge. We’re at a point where all types of utilities, whether it’s water, gas or electric, are faced with the need to invest more and we have to balance that with affordability. 

Recently, we’ve been having more planning conversations with the utilities that we haven’t had in the past, and that isn’t required by Iowa law. There’s a concept in utility regulation called integrated resource planning, where a utility will submit their forward-looking plans, whether that’s five, 10, 15 years out, for feedback and stakeholder input. 

We’ve been having more of those conversations with the utilities, and encouraging them to bring us those plans so that we can have those conversations. We’re trying to encourage more transparency and openness from the utilities and having those conversations up front. 

There have been a lot of people at the utility commission meetings talking about the Summit pipeline and eminent domain. How is the commission handling that issue?

I can’t talk about the details of a specific contested case that’s open, but I can say, if there’s an issue that’s in front of us or that we’ve made a decision on that’s controversial, that can manifest itself in different ways. Here there is judicial follow-up happening, where the decision is being challenged in court. That is a follow-up action for us. There is also discussion at the Legislature and we follow those discussions as well to determine how it will impact our jurisdiction and our future actions. You have the three branches of government doing their jobs here.

A project of this magnitude can be quite a large workload on our staff. There are thousands of parcels of land that are needed and we review each parcel for whether the petitioner met the regulatory requirements and have they dotted all their i’s and crossed all their t’s? We have staff who drive the route of an entire proposed pipeline project and look for obstructions, like a building in the way or a safety issue. I’ll just say, when we issue decisions, it’s after a very comprehensive and thorough review and analysis of the evidence presented, and those decisions are based on the law, the record of the case and options in front of us.

Eminent domain is obviously a very important issue to a lot of people. It has caused very strong feelings on each side. I think we did our job correctly, and followed the law and we’ll continue to do that and if we get different direction from the Legislature and the laws they pass and the authority that they grant to us, then we would obviously follow that new guidance as well. 

Are there any further decisions the commission will be making on that issue?

Yes, there are a number of pending motions in front of us on that case so, yes, there’s more that will happen in that case. 

What goals do you have for your position? 

The chair role is really the administrative lead of the agency. You take the commissioner role that all three of us have of decision-making and our decisions on orders, and you add on top administrative responsibility for our organization and our staff. Sometimes people think of it as more power, but it’s really more oversight. 

We have really great staff here. We have accountants, analysts, engineers, inspectors and attorneys, all very technical and specialized in this utility space. Maintaining a really great work environment is important; mentoring people, making sure they have the training opportunities they need. Because as much as our decisions matter, the commissioners rely on our staff to help us make decisions to analyze the information we get, to give us recommendations.

The better that our staff are supported, the better decisions we’re going to make as commissioners. For me, it’s just making sure we’ve got a really strong organization, good leadership. Staff feel supported. Staff are accountable to the important work we’re doing for the state and for utilities, and another part of that is efficiency. All of our costs are not paid by the general fund. We charge the utilities directly for the work that we do. If we spend 40 hours on a case, that gets charged to the utility, and typically, the utility will charge that back to the rate payers. If we’re not efficient, if we’re wasting time on something, that goes back to cost. We have to be responsible with our resources, make decisions efficiently and on a timely basis and maintain respect and trust with our stakeholders. 

Is there anything that you would like the business community to know, either about the commission or you or the work that you guys do? 

I think it surprises a lot of people to learn how involved our proceedings are and they sometimes get surprised that it’s a full-time job, and that we have 75 staff, but it’s a lot of work in front of us. For rate cases, you spend 10 months of back-and-forth testimony and a hearing. We really scrutinize all these decisions and all these numbers. We read all the comments, and we listen to the stakeholders who intervene and we listen to the businesses that intervene. We have business groups that share their side. Honestly, I’d say our decision-making is better when we get more of that, more of that input, more of that feedback, sharing the context of what people are seeing, what they’re experiencing, in terms of utility service, utility costs, utility reliability. 

We try to do our best. If there’s feedback on that, if they think we’re missing something, let us know. We’re trying to be more transparent with our monthly meetings; they’re being broadcast now. We are trying to share more about how we do things at the commission, so that that’s more in the open. We take our jobs very seriously, and we understand the huge impact utility costs can have on businesses, and we take that to heart. 

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At a glance

Hometown: Rochester, Minn. 

Education: Bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Iowa State University; master of science in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, Irvine

Resides in: Ames

Family: Husband and three children

Contact: sarah.martz@iuc.iowa.gov