Iowa replaced California to become the state with the second-most wind energy generation capacity in the nation, according to the American Wind Energy Association Monday.

Iowa installed nearly 1.6 gigawatts of capacity in 2008 alone and had a cumulative capacity of about 2.8 gigawatts by the end of last year, the AWEA said in its 2008 annual report. California had a cumulative capacity of about 2.5 gigawatts through last year. Minnesota followed with about 1.8 gigawatts, with Washington rounding the top five with 1.4 gigawatts.

Texas retained its No. 1 ranking with a cumulative installation of 7.1 gigawatts. The state added about 2.6 gigawatts in 2008. It not only has the right wind resources and easy permitting processes to plant wind farms, the state regulators also are moving more quickly than other states to beef up its transmission and distriution networks to ferry wind energy from remote locations to big cities. The Texas Public Utility Commission in January this year approved $5 billion worth of projects for a host of companies to build roughly 2,900 miles of power lines.

Wind energy is typically cheaper than solar power, making wind attractive to utilities that must add renewable energy to their mix by state-set deadlines. California requires its investor-owned utilities to have 20 percent renewable power by 2010. Although the utilities have been busy signing contracts to buy solar and other types of renewable power, they aren’t likely to meet that goal.

NextEra Energy Resources, formerly FPL Energy, is the country’s largest wind farm owner. It installed about 1.2 gigawatts last year and owned a total of 6.3 gigawatts by the end of 2008. That’s about 25 percent of the country’s overall capacity of 25.4 gigawatts, the AWEA said.

Iberdrola, MidAmerican Energy, Horizon, Invenergy and Babcock & Brown Wind followed NextEra in wind farm ownership.

Independent power producers still own most of the wind farms in the country; the utilities own about 15 percent of the installations. MidAmerican Energy, which serves Iowa and nearby states, owns the most wind capacity (1.9 gigawatts), followed by Puget Sound Energy (385 megawatts), We Energies (146.5 megawatts), Dominion Energy (132 megawatts) and Xcel Energy (126.9 megawatts).