Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has joined the Trump administration’s assault on wind energy with the rollout of a new policy designed to push turbines away from the nation’s transportation arteries.
Duffy said last month that he would recommend keeping future wind turbines at least 1.2 miles away from both railroads and highways — citing the potential for the turbines to interfere with railroad radio communication. He added the Transportation Department would study the issue further and work with other federal agencies to enforce the setback.
But critics have complained that Duffy’s actions are outsize to the problem and rely on scant evidence. They say it’s part of the administration’s broader attack on green energy.
Duffy unveiled the July 29 policy amid a rapid-fire series of announcements by the Interior Department against the wind industry. In a statement, he said it’s about “implementing a higher standard of safety.”
But there are political bonuses too for Duffy.
The new policy allows Duffy to curry favor with the White House and push against an industry that President Donald Trump has personally targeted. And it gives the Republican official a chance to throw an elbow at former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who could make a run for president in 2028.
“Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg put climate religion ahead of safety — blatantly ignoring engineers who warned of the danger of constructing wind turbines near railroads and highways,” Duffy said in a statement.
In the weeks since Duffy announced the new policy, the evidence behind it has come under scrutiny. It was largely based on single report by a railroad industry consultant. And the wind industry contends the research is flawed and says that the Transportation Department is misinterpreting the results.
“It’s Federal overreach, and an affront to private property rights,” the American Clean Power Association, a trade group for the wind industry, said in an email. “Based on decades of experience with more than 75,000 turbines operating today there is no evidence to justify DOT’s recommendation.”
The report said it’s possible for wind turbines to interfere with the radio system used in positive train control, a system used to help trains avoid collisions and operate at safe speeds.
The research was based on field tests at wind farms near Tehachapi, California, that primarily use older-model turbines — some of them with metal parts in the blades. The turbines are also packed more closely than most U.S. wind farms.
Most modern wind turbines are taller than the models in Tehachapi, and their blades are made from wood and composites, which reduces their impact on radio signals.
Moreover, the study doesn’t recommend an across-the-board 1.2 mile setback — it suggests a 0.3-mile buffer and varying levels of “assessment” for distances out to 1.2 miles. It also doesn’t mention highways.
When asked about these details, the Transportation Department did not provide on-the-record answers to POLITICO’s E&E News.
An agency spokesperson did not address questions about the study’s findings nor did the spokesperson say why the department recommended a setback between wind turbines and highways — when highways weren’t part of the rail study.
The Transportation Department has said the agency under Buttigieg was concerned about turbines interfering with internet-enabled cars and trucks and had considered a 1-to-3-mile setback before dropping the idea.
A longtime Trump target
The wind industry says it has a lengthy history of working with airports, military bases and weather stations to reduce the impact on radar and communications equipment.
The disruption comes at a critical time for the broader renewable power sector. The U.S. needs to build more than 100 gigawatts of new generation over the next four years and only a handful of technologies — including wind, solar and gas — can scale up that fast, said Ray Long, chief executive officer of the American Council on Renewable Energy.
“Unfortunately, the Department of Transportation action comes alongside a series of unwarranted federal policy interventions that undermine renewable energy deployment at a moment when certainty and timely permitting are essential,” Long said in a written statement.
If turbines are creating problems for railroads, the industry’s main trade group hasn’t heard about it. The Association of American Railroads is “unaware of any instances of interference with rail communication systems, [but] we recognize that potential concerns have been raised,” a spokeswoman said in an email.
Railroads already use using positive train control — the radio system that was at the center of the consultant’s study — in cities and in dense industrial corridors where there’s a potential for signal interference, without major problems, said William Vantuono, the editor of Railway Age.
“I’ve never heard of that,” he said of the concern over wind turbines.
The Commerce Department has a mechanism for resolving disputes over interference with radio and other forms of communication such as radar. A subsidiary of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee, collects input from federal agencies about wind and other energy projects.
The committee doesn’t have siting authority, but it serves as a forum for wind developers to informally address concerns raised about their projects.
The Transportation Department released a pair of letters from the Interdepartment Radio Advisory Committee to bolster its claim that Buttigieg and the Biden-era department ignored potential safety issues with a wind farm in Illinois.
The first letter said the Transportation Department had “raised concerns” that a wind project in Illinois could interfere with nearby rail lines and recommended a 1- to 3-mile setback. The second letter said the Transportation Department had withdrawn that recommendation but would continue to study it.
The letter lists a midlevel DOT staffer as the point of contact and doesn’t mention Buttigieg by name. The Commerce Department said the Illinois project was “radar neutral” and other agencies “did not identify any concerns regarding radio frequency blockage,” according to both letters.
Under Buttigieg, the department made 33 similar decisions on other wind projects, the DOT said in a news release. The department didn’t release details of those decisions, and it didn’t respond when asked if the Illinois wind farm had created any real-world radio interference, or if there was evidence of problems with other wind operations.
The wind industry has long been in Trump’s crosshairs, and he’s kept up the pressure since retaking the White House. “The windmills are killing our country,” Trump said at a bill signing ceremony in June.
The DOT announcement came the same day Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his staff to eliminate “preferential treatment” for wind and solar projects on federal land. The next day, the Interior Department rescinded all offshore wind areas.
And on Aug. 1, Burgum ordered the department to evaluate wind and solar projects based on their “capacity density,” essentially arguing that renewables tie up more federal acreage than oil and gas development.
Taken together, the actions suggest the Trump administration is looking for ways to slow down wind development around the country.
The Transportation Department order could make a lot of land undevelopable for wind power, particularly areas that are already disturbed and don’t have high conservation value, said Justin Meuse, director of government relations for The Wilderness Society.
“It does seem to be part and parcel of their broader efforts to take land off the table for renewables,” he said in an email.
Jeremy Firestone, a researcher at the University of Delaware who studies wind power, said it’s always useful to study the impact of permitting and siting policies for wind power, but that’s not what the federal agencies are doing.
“I would characterize it as putting as many constraints on where one can develop, obstacles to go around, barriers and fences to climb, and hoops to jump through for wind power development as the Administration can think of that bear at least some minimal relationship to rationality regardless of whether they are objectively reasonable,” he said in an email.
This story also appears in Energywire.
