Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has taken a wrecking ball to the U.S. wind industry since joining the Trump administration earlier this year.
But it hasn’t always been that way.
In just seven months at Interior, Burgum has blocked or stalled at least six major wind projects, including one off the coast of New England that’s 80 percent complete. At the same time, Burgum has cast doubt on the reliability of wind power, telling CNBC last week that “you don’t know when the wind’s gonna blow.”
Yet Burgum’s recent turn as wind power nemesis stands in contrast to how he viewed the energy source during his time as North Dakota governor. During his eight years in office, wind power flourished in his home state — so much so that Burgum honored wind power last year as part of a weeklong celebration for clean energy.
“Wind power provided about one-third of North Dakota’s net generation in 2022,” Burgum bragged in his September 2024 proclamation. That put North Dakota “among the top six states with the largest share of electricity generated by wind.”
That’s not all.
In 2021, he called on his state to reach carbon neutrality by 2030. It’s an aggressive timeline, but Burgum said North Dakota is uniquely positioned to hit that mark because it boasts enough underground storage space to store “4,400 years’ worth of the state’s carbon output,” according to the governor’s office.
“We can reach carbon neutrality in the state of North Dakota by 2030 without a single mandate, without any additional regulation,” Burgum said in 2021. “We can get there just through the innovation and the different geology that we have.”
An Interior Department spokesperson did not directly answer questions as to why Burgum’s position on wind had changed so significantly in the last year but issued a statement that attacked the “Radical Green New Scam” and promoted fossil fuel generation.
“Secretary Burgum is in agreement with President Donald Trump that protecting our energy security means ensuring the American people aren’t reliant on designed to fail energy sources, such as wind, which is why the Department of the Interior recently ended special treatment for these unreliable energy sources,” Aubrie Spady said in a statement.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly added that Burgum has “long aligned with the President’s agenda to Make America Energy Dominant Again, largely through prioritizing fossil fuel-generated energy.”
To be sure, Burgum was a big booster for fossil fuels when he was governor — which makes sense given North Dakota’s wealth of oil, gas and coal reserves. But it was part of a broader “all-of-the-above” energy policy that one North Dakota Democrat says he no longer recognizes.
Burgum “went out ahead of his fellow Republican governors and it put us on a path towards carbon neutrality in an aggressive time frame,” said state Rep. Zachary Ista. “He knew that wind power was one of those important features to reach that goal.”
But now, Ista says he fears for workers in his district — which includes the city of Grand Forks — who work at a wind turbine manufacturing plant, LM Wind Power. “Their jobs are the ones that are getting played, they’re having politics played with them,” said Ista, who serves as minority leader in the North Dakota state house.
When he was first elected in 2016, Burgum was a moderate who avoided culture wars and did not seek to block renewable energy, said Scott Skokos, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, a conservation group that advocates for clean energy.
In fact, Burgum as governor did not back a GOP-led effort in the state legislature to ban wind turbines, Skokos noted.
“A lot of people are very confused about what happened to Doug Burgum,” Skokos said. “People kind of think of Doug as something like two different people. There is Doug Burgum pre-presidential run, and then there’s Doug now.”
Burgum briefly sought the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
As Interior secretary, Burgum has been aggressive in his attacks on wind generation. In Europe last week, he said there was “not a future for offshore wind” in the Trump administration.
Last month, as part of its ongoing efforts to throttle clean energy projects, the Interior Department issued an order that made clear it would now consider as a factor the amount of space a proposed project takes up compared to other energy sources. That’s a directive aimed at wind projects, which can require more acreage than oil and gas drilling.
Burgum again repeated his newfound worries about wind energy, claiming it was “unreliable.”
“Gargantuan, unreliable, intermittent energy projects hold America back from achieving U.S. Energy Dominance while weighing heavily on the American taxpayer and environment,” Burgum said in a statement.
Under Burgum, the Interior Department has proposed revoking the permits for at least three offshore wind projects in the Atlantic, canceled approvals for a massive onshore wind project in Idaho and issued a stop-work order on an offshore wind project that is 80 percent complete. Interior also issued a stop-work order on a New York wind project, but later lifted it.
Additionally, the Interior Department is working to slow additional wind projects by exploring their impact on migratory birds, eliminating policies “biased in favor of wind and solar energy” and weighing whether to remove areas onshore and offshore for wind energy development.
Burgum’s recent attacks on wind energy are notable too given how much the power source has helped his home state. During Burgum’s tenure as governor, from 2016 to 2024, wind power generation more than doubled in North Dakota, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
North Dakota is a natural source for wind because it has “substantial and nearly continuous wind energy resources,” according to the EIA. That natural advantage helps explain why North Dakota has more than 4,000 megawatts of installed wind power generating capacity and four of its top 10 power plants by generation are powered by wind.
That takes on extra significance because North Dakota is ranked third among states — behind only Texas and New Mexico — for crude oil reserves and production. And yet, the state’s electricity generation mix is about 40 percent clean energy, including wind at 35 percent and hydropower at 5 percent, according to EIA data from 2024.
The first elected office Burgum held was North Dakota governor, so he started running the state like a CEO of company who recognized the value in all forms of energy production, said Heather Reams, CEO of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative clean energy advocacy group.
He had a “problem-solving mindset” and clearly saw the value in wind because North Dakota had so much energy potential, she said.
“He was looking at the balance sheet more than anything, I think that was his motivation, rather than anything political because he didn’t come from politics, doesn’t have that background,” Reams said. “You can see how he operated much more as a more like, a CEO, an innovative thinker, out of the box thinker.”
That has certainly changed now that Burgum is leading Trump’s anti-wind crusade, but Reams said it seems like Burgum is just following the president’s priorities rather than relying on his own experience as governor of a wind-intensive state.
Whatever Burgum may profess to believe now, investors don’t seem to buy in when it comes to clean energy in the state he once led, said Skokos, of the Dakota Resource Council.
“Clearly North Dakota doesn’t agree with Doug because we rely on so much wind power,” he said. “And clearly wind is reliable in North Dakota because people keep investing in it.”
This story also appears in Energywire.
