President Donald Trump was at a bill signing last week when he veered onto one of his favorite topics: wind energy.
“The windmills are killing our country by the way,” the president said before signing bills to block California’s gas car phase-out. Wind turbines are “garbage,” he said, as well as “bullshit,” “horrible” and “very expensive to paint.”
“We’re not going to approve windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency,” Trump said. “I guess it could happen, but we’re not doing any of them.”
That near-total opposition to wind has been particularly catastrophic to the offshore industry, squelching investments and halting ongoing projects in their tracks at a time when Northeast states are desperate for more power. POLITICO’s E&E News found that about a dozen East Coast wind projects planned during the Biden administration are now in purgatory, potentially collapsing a portfolio that could power hundreds of thousands of homes.
More projects could falter if Republicans follow through with their plans in Congress to gut clean energy tax credits, industry advocates say.
“We’ve seen a chilling effect across the industry from the administration’s stance on offshore wind, and subsequent damaging executive orders,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition.
On his first day in office, Trump withdrew all federal waters from offshore wind leasing and ordered a review of all wind leasing and permitting. His executive order directs agencies to not “issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects pending the completion of a comprehensive assessment and review.”
The White House did not answer questions from E&E News about the status of that review. But analysts do not expect it to be completed.
“It was not written with the purpose of being transparent and encouraging,” said Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Anybody in the industry must assume that barring some wholesale change of heart, perhaps driven by new policy perspectives … from the Trump administration and from the president, it’s really hard to imagine how there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
Interior Secretary Doug Bergum’s decision earlier this year to stop — and then restart — oil giant Equinor’s Empire 1 offshore wind project only further reinforced the Trump administration’s deep antipathy for wind turbines. The project off New York was already permitted and under construction when Bergum issued a stop work order, claiming the project’s approval had been rushed.
The fallout from the administration’s opposition to wind has been swift.
This month, the lone wind project being constructed off the coast of New Jersey pulled the plug on its state power contract following a revoked air permit from EPA. Earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior agency that manages wind leasing in federal waters, paused the environmental review process for a wind farm in the New York Bight that had been announced in the final days of the Biden administration.
It doesn’t just affect offshore wind, either. In a court filing last month, the Alliance for Clean Energy New York wrote that federal agencies across the country “ceased issuing approvals for wind projects nationwide.”
“The outcome that I fear is one in which there are unexplained and unexplainable delays, and there’s just not any transparency at all,” Elkind said.
BOEM and Interior did not answer questions about how agencies are interpreting the executive order halting offshore wind approvals.
Sidelined projects
There are around 30 offshore wind projects that have leases in the outer continental shelf, according to BOEM data. Those range in status from early-stage lease acquisitions to a few that are operating commercially. Several that were in planning stages have been canceled recently.
“We’re seeing announcements that companies are sidelining projects with the expectation that no progress will be made during the administration,” said Stephen Maldonado, a research analyst at the firm Wood Mackenzie.
For example, Shell had invested in offshore wind projects before earlier this year pulling out of Atlantic Shores, the now-canceled New Jersey project. The oil major told E&E News that the company “will not lead new offshore wind developments.”
“We remain interested in offtakes where commercial terms are acceptable and are cautiously open to equity positions, if there is a compelling investment case,” a spokesperson, Natalie Gunnell, said in an email.
Five offshore wind farms are under construction now — including Empire Wind — and are expected by analysts to be completed roughly on schedule. That will add 5.7 gigawatts of power to East Coast power grids, with the last project set to finish construction in 2027.
But a dozen other projects — including ones off of New England, New Jersey, Delaware and North Carolina — have not yet progressed to the construction stage. All are unlikely to make much progress over the next four years, prompting analysts to slash their predictions for the amount of offshore wind power the U.S. will build over the next decade.
BloombergNEF, the market research firm, slashed its forecast of new offshore wind power to come online by 2035 by 56 percent as a result of the Trump administration’s policies, according to an April report.
That’s because any projects that have yet to reach a “final investment decision” — lingo for securing the money to begin construction — are expected to completely stall out during Trump’s term. That will delay or cancel $114 billion in investments in some 22 gigawatts of projects.
That outlook is digging a massive hole in state and federal climate targets that had been counting on offshore wind to help power the densely populated Eastern Seaboard, the BloombergNEF report found. States that have set goals for offshore wind still rely on BOEM to permit projects that are in federal waters.
There will be just 6.1 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, BloombergNEF predicted, which is only 20 percent of former President Joe Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts. Eleven states have offshore wind targets, and none of them are on track to come even close to hitting them, according to a review of active projects by the firm.
Supply chain troubles
Even before Trump took office, the industry faced headwinds, including supply chain constraints and rising interest rates. After peaking in late 2020, wind energy investments have largely trended downwards ever since, according to data from the Clean Investment Monitor.
Siemens Gamesa, a major turbine manufacturer, canceled its plan to build blades in Virginia back in 2023. Vestas, another manufacturer that planned to construct a New Jersey assembly plant for nacelles, the piece of a turbine that generates power from its movement, may never build it without sufficient demand. Other manufacturing proposals in New York have also been shelved. (Vestas did not respond to a request for comment.)
The lack of domestic suppliers means projects in the U.S. pipeline will continue to rely on Europe for parts, which leaves them extremely vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs.
Power generation costs could also increase by nearly a quarter for wind farms if Republicans terminate the investment tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the BloombergNEF report.
The House-passed GOP megabill would roll back the credits, requiring clean energy projects to begin construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage to still qualify. The bill also requires such projects to be placed in service by 2028 to get the credits.
It’s unclear whether those cuts will survive the Senate. The current Senate proposal scrapped the 60-day timeline but would begin to phase out the credits for wind in 2026.
“The prospect of tariffs and a roll back of federal tax credits have created an environment where key steps in building an offshore wind farm — like signing financing deals and supplier agreements — are now impossible,” said Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst who authored the BloombergNEF report.
That environment has quieted new investments and made offshore wind developers keep their heads down.
“The market right now is frozen,” Jennifer Granholm, who served as Energy secretary under Biden, said at this month’s POLITICO Energy Summit, referring to energy investors generally. “Nobody is doing anything until they get the rules of the road.”
For some clean energy advocates, the administration’s opposition to offshore wind is perplexing: coastal wind farms provide thousands of domestic jobs and could boost efforts to rekindle U.S. manufacturing.
“Given the ideal alignment between offshore wind’s priorities and those of the administration: onshoring large manufacturing and shipbuilding, energy independence and dominance, and economic development, the industry has every reason to believe that offshore wind can be successful during the Trump administration,” said Kollins of the Southeastern Wind Coalition.
Hillary Bright, the leader of offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, said in a statement that the administration “should take full advantage of America’s many energy resources and the unique ability of offshore wind to help meet surging demand, support economic competitiveness, and further American energy.”
Elizabeth Wilson, an environmental studies professor at Dartmouth College who researches offshore wind, said there is one possible silver lining to the wind industry’s slowdown: extra time for developers and regulators to understand how to get projects built.
“I don’t like this pause, but from a learning perspective of, ‘How do we operationally make these things work,’ it might not be a bad thing,” she said, adding that ultimately, shifting to technologies like wind are necessary for energy markets in a world faced with climate change.
“None of our infrastructures are ready for the world we’re moving into,” she said. “We have to do something differently.”
This story also appears in Climatewire.
