The House Republican spending bill for the Interior Department contains another potential punch for the beleaguered offshore wind industry: big new fees.
The fiscal 2027 Interior-Environment spending bill, which a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced last week, would impose a range of fees on offshore wind projects. Those are broken into annual fees and physical inspection fees.
Annual fees would be $7,300 for an onshore inspection visit to an offshore wind project’s control center and $15,400 for a visual inspection of a wind turbine. Further physical inspections of a wind turbine or substation would cost $72,800.
The new fees largely reflect the White House’s proposed budget for Interior, released in March. The fees could amount to much more than is paid by offshore oil companies for inspections, given that the language calls for per-turbine inspections and wind farms include many turbines: 62 for the newly running Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts and more than 170 anticipated for a project under construction off the coast of Virginia.
“This appears as another direct effort to constrain the offshore wind industry,” said Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, in an email. “The Trump Administration has already significantly constrained proposed offshore wind projects and may hope the inspection fees undermine the viability of projects already in service.”
Inspection fees and other similar charges are common in the energy sector, and wind industry players have long expected a fee schedule was in the offing. Offshore wind did not take off in the U.S. until the Biden administration, with several projects under construction right now along the East Coast. Vineyard Wind finished construction in March and is working to bring all of its turbines online, while Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island has nearly installed all of its 65 turbines and has begun to send power to the grid.
But the Trump administration has hammered wind energy by canceling leases, trying to block projects currently being built and paying companies to abandon their plans.
An Interior spokesperson declined to comment on the fee language. Spokespeople for Republican appropriators did not respond to a request for comment.
The fees would be overseen by the administration’s planned new Marine Minerals Administration, an agency that combines the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to oversee offshore oil and gas and wind power.
In the administration’s budget justification, officials wrote that the new fees are needed following the expansion of offshore wind during the Biden administration.
“Based on this expansion, and so that offshore wind operators are not held to different standards than oil and gas companies, MMA is proposing inspection fees to offset MMA’s costs,” the administration wrote in its budget justification.
But Democrats in Congress, analysts and former officials are skeptical that the fees are intended to implement a level playing field, saying they appear instead to reflect President Donald Trump’s antipathy for wind energy.
At last week’s Interior-Environment Subcommittee hearing, ranking member Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) criticized the bill for not blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to squash the wind industry, noting that it seemed to “pile on by adding additional fees for offshore wind companies.”
In an email, Pingree said the Trump administration needs to answer questions about the fee language, including why the physical inspection fee is higher for offshore wind than oil and gas companies and how the fees would be implemented.
“This proposal does not appear to be about fairness to taxpayers. It looks like one more roadblock for renewable energy, layered on top of the administration’s broader effort to stack the deck in favor of fossil fuels,” she said.
The bill language also does not clarify when visual versus physical inspections would be required. The Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the White House’s budget proposals, did not respond to questions about how the fees would work.
“The lack of clarity and predictability on inspection fees for offshore wind is concerning,” said Pasha Feinberg, an offshore wind strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Analysts were quick to note that fees for any given project could stack up quickly if they are levied on a per-turbine basis.
Electric utility Dominion Energy is in the process of installing 176 turbines at the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, for instance. On a per-turbine basis, the fees for that project could be between $2.7 million and $12.8 million, depending on the kind of inspections, if all of the turbines are included.
Dominion did not respond to a request for comment.
Annual fees for offshore oil and gas operations under the bill, by contrast, have been largely the same for years and are not charged per well.
Current annual fees for offshore oil and gas operations — which are maintained in the House Republicans spending plan — amount to $10,500 for structures with no wells, $17,000 for ones with one to 10 wells and $31,500 for those with more than 10 wells. Other fees are charged for drilling rigs based on water depth: $16,700 for shallow water rig inspections and $30,500 for those in deeper water. Inspecting wells operating without rigs under the bill would range from $4,470 to $13,260, depending on their water depth.
Elizabeth Klein, who directed BOEM during the Biden administration, said that based on the bill, offshore wind developers could potentially pay millions for BSEE officials to board a helicopter and visually inspect dozens of turbines.
“That’s nuts,” she said, adding that the oil and gas fees were “nowhere near the amount that could be suggested here.”
Klein also said the fee for a physical inspection of a turbine — which would be more than twice the cost of inspecting rigs — also seemed odd, given how large deep-water rigs can be.
Other critics said that the fees don’t reflect the potential environmental harms from accidents. While accidents will also occur with offshore wind — such as a turbine blade breaking off — the environmental harm caused by an oil spill is often much larger.
Jeremy Firestone, a professor at the University of Delaware’s School of Marine Science and Policy, said that offshore oil and gas fees and wind fees are not comparable “given the much greater risk associated with catastrophic failure.”
“There would be differential economic effect as well given different amounts of energy generated per turbine versus per rig,” Firestone said. “The fees seem very high.”
Spokespeople for the American Clean Power Association and the National Ocean Industries Association, the two industry groups that represent major clean energy developers, declined to comment. The American Petroleum Institute also did not comment on the proposed wind fees and how they compare to oil and gas fees.
Other offshore wind developers — including Equinor, the builder of New York’s Empire Wind; Ørsted, the builder of several projects; and Vineyard Wind, a company jointly owned by Avangrid Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — did not respond to requests for comment.
Feinberg with the NRDC said that while fees for the wind industry are appropriate, they should be “commensurate with the cost of inspection and risk.”
“The potential impact of offshore oil and gas failure has much more far-reaching consequences,” Feinberg said.
“That the offshore wind fees are so much higher than the fees for oil and gas raises concerns, given the relentless attacks from this administration against renewable energy,” she added. “If these fees are intentionally excessive to be weaponized by the administration to harm wind projects, it would curtail the clean energy we need now more than ever.”
Jennifer Yachnin contributed to this report.
