Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has reaffirmed his stance against the offshore wind industry, promising Tuesday that “no new windmills” would be built during his second term in office.
Trump made the remarks amidst a lengthy, disorganized hodgepodge of passing thoughts and unsettled grievances billed as a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that was very much reminiscent of the political theatre we all grew accustomed to during his first presidency. But unlike his suggestion to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” or his sudden desire to annex Canada and buy Greenland, Trump’s vendetta against turbines and the clean power they produce is long-running, well-established, and appears to have some teeth.
“We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said, adding that they “litter our country” like “garbage in a field.”
On the campaign trail last year, Trump promised to sign an executive order on the first day of his presidency halting offshore wind development.
“Nobody wants them and they are very expensive,” the President-elect asserted Tuesday, likening the Biden Administration’s spending on clean energy to throwing money “out the window.”
Why doesn’t Trump like wind power?
Trump’s beef with wind turbines appears to trace back to (unsuccessfully) lobbying against the construction of one built in the backdrop of one of his Scottish golf courses. Since then, he has proliferated a series of false claims including that wind farms are harmful to the environment, they’re somehow linked to cancer, and that they kill birds and whales, “obviously driving them crazy.”
It’s worth noting that Trump is recognized as friendly to fossil fuel interests. He has pledged to massively increase oil production, a plan that could be stymied slightly by President Biden’s new prohibition on oil and gas lease sales in 625 million acres of federal waters, although the United States is already the world’s biggest oil producer and more production may not be a priority at the moment. The President-elect campaigned on drastically decreasing energy costs for Americans and pledged to achieve global “energy dominance.”
Trump’s implication that nobody wants wind power, like many of his claims on the topic, is also off base. Recent data from the Pew Research Center indicates Americans are pretty split on the issue. As one might expect, younger, more urban, and liberal respondents to Pew’s surveys had higher opinions of wind power and its potential, but overall, attitudes seemed to be in line with thoughts on solar development.
Trump is right about offshore wind being expensive, though. His disdain for spinning steel could put billions of dollars of investments and the future reliability of multiple power grids in jeopardy.
Look no further than last week, when international developer Equinor closed on a more than $3 billion financing package for its U.S. undertaking, Empire Wind 1. The 810-megawatt (MW) project is situated southeast of Long Island and is poised to be the first offshore wind project to connect to the New York City grid once it achieves commercial operation in 2027. Offtake agreements for the power produced by Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind, a 924 MW Ørsted project, were finalized in June 2024, adding to 12 gigawatts (GW) of other projects with active offtake agreements in the United States, including more than 4 GW under active construction at Vineyard Wind, Revolution Wind, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.
How much control will Trump have?
Once he is back in office, Trump will have influence over what gets built in federal waters and on federal lands but will have no control over what happens on private property. It appears likely he will advise the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) against issuing any new offshore leases, but will have limited say over projects that have already been issued permits.
“These leases, in many cases, have already been awarded,” explained Mike Catanzaro, the president and chief policy officer at advocacy and lobbying firm CGCN Group. “Projects are underway, so it’s difficult to get in the way of that, although statutes would allow the interior secretary or other agencies to get involved and look at environmental impacts, particularly on whales, to the extent that’s a thing.”
Scientists have concluded there is no evidence to support wind development harming whales.
Even if Trump can’t stand in the way of offshore endeavors already in progress, Catanzaro and other experts believe a Republican trifecta is more likely to enable the incoming president to enact an anti-wind agenda in general.
“Republicans in Congress have already signaled that they don’t like offshore wind either,” Catanzaro noticed. “I think Congress is also a threat here to the industry, something (they) have to worry about.”
President Joe Biden’s administration approved the nation’s first 11 commercial-scale offshore wind projects and BOEM held a series of auctions that attracted billions of dollars in bids from American and international energy companies interested in offshore leases. The U.S. project pipeline now has more than 27 GW of projects at or beyond the permitting stage; Biden previously targeted 30 GW deployed by 2030, although that target will certainly be missed if Trump stays true to his word. According to the American Clean Power Association, more than 60 GW of offshore wind capacity is under development in the United States. The 2024 Offshore Wind Market Report projects that $65 billion will be invested in such projects by 2030.
Trump’s influence on renewable energy development
Trump’s threats are already echoing through the offshore wind industry. Last month, the CEO of multinational energy company TotalEnergies said he would be pausing work on Attentive Energy, a planned 3 GW project off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, at least in part due to Trump’s previous promises to undermine the industry.
“Offshore wind, I have decided to put the project on pause,” Patrick Pouyanne told attendees of the Energy Intelligence Forum in London. “I said to my team, the project in New York, we’ll see that in four years,” he added. “But the advantage is it’s only for four years.”
Vineyard Wind 2, the proposed sequel to the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind project Vineyard Wind 1, pulled its 1.2 GW capacity from contract negotiations last week. Massachusetts had previously elected to acquire 800 MW from Vineyard Wind 2, but the project’s future was dependent on Connecticut picking up its remaining 400 MW of capacity. Connecticut chose to procure more solar and storage projects instead.
“We were proud to submit our Vineyard Wind 2 proposal in response to the New England three-state solicitation, and we are grateful to Massachusetts for its provisional award of 800 MW. With Connecticut’s decision not to purchase the remaining 400 MW we are unable to contract the project’s full 1200 MW at this time,” Vineyard Offshore spokesperson Kathryn Niforos told WBUR. “We look forward to advancing this project and participating in future solicitations to meet the region’s growing energy needs while spurring economic investment and creating thousands of American energy jobs.”
Vineyard Wind 1, jointly owned by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and being built out to 806 MW, sent its first power to the grid about a year ago. The project suffered a well-documented mishap last summer involving a flimsy turbine blade that broke into a bunch of pieces and fell into the ocean. Although nobody was injured and the blade failure’s environmental impact appears to be minimal, the incident no less provides further fodder for President-elect Trump’s cannon pointed at anything spinning on a pole.
And critics of steel in the water aren’t the only ones lining up behind Trump hoping his second term leads to less renewable energy development. Cries for a deus ex Trump have been ringing out from coast to coast; Farmers in the Midwest want protection from sprawling solar sites infringing on crop production, Marylanders hope Trump steps in to kill a planned transmission line in PJM Interconnection, and Idaho legislators are banking on him driving a stake into the heart of the seemingly endlessly divisive Lava Ridge onshore wind project.
More than 400 counties have imposed local restrictions or bans on wind turbines to date, including much of Tennessee and Kentucky. Despite that apparent resistance, wind power is a prominent part of the generation mix for several classically red states. Texas has used more wind power than any other for more than two decades, and more than one-fifth of its power can be derived from the clean energy source. Wind accounts for more than half of Iowa’s generation. Major projects are planned in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and other states Trump carried in last November’s election.
