When Donald Trump won the presidential election last November,it wasn’t totally clear how serious he was about dismantling offshore wind.Sure,he liked to rant about turbines making the whales crazy,and there was the infamous legal fight over a wind farm off the coast of his golf course in Scotland.But would he really try to cut down an entire energy sector?Did he even have the power to do so?
The answers,as we found out in this decisive and devastating year,are yes and pretty much.
On his first day in office,Trump issued an executive order that froze offshore wind permitting and ordered the Interior Department to review the projects it had already approved.The move immediately gummed up any developments that didn’t have federal permits,but the upshot was murkier for the nine projects with approvals in hand.(In mid-December,a federal court struck down that executive order.)
The first already-permitted undertaking to crumble was the Atlantic Shores installation in New Jersey.In late January,Shell—one of the two developers—announced it was pulling out.Then New Jersey backed away from buying power from the turbines.Weeks later came the sea salt in the wound:The Environmental Protection Agency revoked a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores.
Trump’s war on offshore wind escalated from there,threatening the viability of a reliable form of electricity even as the president declared an“energy emergency”in the United States.
The administration halted work on New York’s 810-megawatt Empire Wind 1 project in April;construction resumed after about a month and nearly$1 billion in costs for the developer.The budget law passed by Republicans in July killed tax credits for wind farms that don’t come online ASAP.The 704-megawatt Revolution Wind installation near Rhode Island got a stop-work order,too;that one was also lifted after about a month.The Transportation Department yanked funding for a bunch of infrastructure projects related to offshore wind in September.Then Trump told a half-dozen agencies to root around for reasons to oppose installing turbines out at sea.
Just for good measure,the administration is still trying—and sometimes failing—to revoke permits for approved but earlier-stage installations that would likely struggle to begin construction anyway,given the,uh,inhospitable climate.
The clearest way to understand the carnage is to look at the numbers.
When Trump was elected last November,BloombergNEF expected the U.S.to build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035.The research group hedged that number to 21.5 gigawatts if Trump managed to repeal wind tax credits during his term.(Reminder:He did.)
BNEF now expects just 6 gigawatts to be built by 2035—an amount equivalent to the capacity of the five wind farms currently under construction,as well as America’s only completed large-scale project,New York’s South Fork.Should Trump’s late-December pause on all of these in-progress wind farms result in cancellations,the number will be even lower.
The energy source,long considered a cornerstone of grid-reliability and decarbonization plans in the Northeast,was already in a fragile place before Trump took office for the second time.Inflation and pandemic-era supply-chain thorniness had scrambled economics.Local opposition,both astroturfed and real,was on the rise.Major projects from major developers had already fallen apart.
Trump’s all-out war would have been difficult for any industry to survive.But for a nascent one that was already in deep water—and which is uniquely dependent on federal permitting—it was all but impossible.
The question now is whether the Trump 2.0 era will prove to be a four-year blip or the start of longer-term doldrums for the sector in America.
