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Clean energy developers and the bankers who fund them are all pretty confident that a change in power in Washington, should one occur next year, won’t mean the end of the Inflation Reduction Act or the buildout of renewables across the country — except, that is, when it comes to offshore wind. Trump has special contempt for wind energy in all its forms — to him, all wind turbines are bird murderers, but offshore turbines are especially deadly, adding both whales and property values to their list of victims. He has said he will issue an executive order on day one of his second turn as president to “make sure that that ends.”
While the scope and legal enforceability of any potential executive order remain unclear, the wind industry, environmental activists, and analysts have all found plenty of other reasons to be worried.
“I think it’s safe to say that it’s pretty clear from Trump’s first term in office and everything he’s been saying on the campaign trail that he’s pretty hostile towards offshore wind,” David Rogers, the deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, told me.
Trump’s first administration exhibited a kind of bipolar attitude toward offshore wind — sometimes issuing press releases bragging about leasing to developers, sometimes dragging out environmental approval for major projects.
In December, 2018, when the Department of the Interior leased some 2 million acres of ocean territory to offshore wind developers for almost $500 million, the office put out a press release bragging about a “BIDDING BONANZA” and quoting then-Secretary Ryan Zinke saying “to anyone who doubted that our ambitious vision for energy dominance would not include renewables, today we put that rumor to rest.”
The next year, the department delayed and expanded its review of what was then the country’s most advanced wind project, Vineyard Wind, a move that many advocates interpreted as tantamount to canceling it. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who had taken over the department following Zinke’s ignominious resignation, has since defended the review, claiming that he was trying to put the project on firmer legal footing. Vineyard Wind’s developers eventually pulled their permit application and refiled it under the new Biden administration; the project began generating power off the coast of New England early this year, though not before New York’s South Fork Wind beat it onto the grid.
With the U.S. offshore wind industry now far more mature, advocates worry that similar shenanigans would either delay or effectively deny new wind projects that have yet to come online.
David Stevenson, the director of the Caesar Rodney Institute’s Center for Energy & Environmental Policy, who served on Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team and is a longtime opponent of offshore wind, predicted that should Trump win, he would follow through on his promises. “The first thing there will be a day one executive order,” Stevenson told me. That order would almost certainly stop any new approvals, plus possibly stop new construction. Stevenson also said that a Trump administration could settle lawsuits over approvals given to wind projects by agreeing to halt them.
Other tactics at Trump’s disposal could include ceasing new lease auctions; underfunding and understaffing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior Department agency that handles offshore wind; or simply rejecting permits.
“During the Trump administration’s first term, it banned all offshore exploration off of the southeast Atlantic coast — that included drilling and offshore wind. That put a halt on all offshore wind development,” Rogers said. “It wouldn’t be shocking to see some kind of moratorium put in place.”
Not only might new leasing slow to a halt, but projects that are still waiting for final construction authorization from BOEM for might also find themselves stuck in limbo.
“We consider the primary risk here would relate to new projects, rather than existing ones operational or under construction, for example through a federal ban, delay or moratorium on permitting,” Morgan Stanley analyst Robert Pulleyn wrote in a note to clients. Analysts listed three East Coast wind projects with permitting expected to be completed this year — Sunrise Wind in New York, Atlantic Shores South in New Jersey, and Momentum in Maryland — that may yet survive. But Morgan Stanley also identified some 6,500 megawatts of planned projects that are not yet fully permitted that could be at risk in a more wind-hostile White House.
Slow-walking wind the more roundabout way, by reducing staffing, would be a bit trickier for Trump. But as his past record shows, it would also be far from impossible.
“Agency funding levels — which are an important consideration when it comes to staffing — are the result of a negotiation between the executive and legislative branches. So if there is a Trump Administration, the composition of Congress will also influence staffing,” Paul S. Weiland, a partner at the law firm Nossaman LLP, told me in an email. “That said,” he added, “the administration can, more or less by itself, stop hiring and create conditions where staff attrition increases.”
The industry is fully cognizant of these challenges and is preparing a counterargument that focuses not just on clean energy production, but also on the economic and infrastructure development that comes with offshore wind.
At a conference hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy, Meghan Schultz, the chief financial officer of Invenergy, which has offshore wind leases in California and New Jersey, said “it will be important that we’re working as an industry to educate this administration on the value these projects will bring.” She also specifically mentioned the buildout of port infrastructure as something that could be appealing to a Trump White House.
In a recent interview on the Odd Lots podcast, meanwhile, the Danish energy company Orsted’s Americas chief executive, David Hardy, mentioned “job creation, the infrastructure and its core things like steel and ports and ships and factories” as “bipartisan” benefits of offshore wind.
There are even some Republicans in Washington who have supported offshore wind in the past, typically hailing from states that are otherwise friendly to energy development. So while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis staunchly opposes offshore wind development (Florida’s coasts are for tourism and real estate, not industrial development), Louisiana Republicans including House Minority Leader Steve Scalise and Senator John Cassidy have been more supportive. Scalise and Cassidy both signed a bipartisan letter in 2019 encouraging Interior to finish its review of Vineyard Wind, and Cassidy cheered offshore wind leasing in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We’re an ‘all of the above’ energy state,” Cassidy said at the ACORE conference. “I think offshore wind ideally has a tremendous role.”
But offshore wind off the coast of Louisiana may have more physical and economic problems than political ones, thanks to the Gulf’s relatively low wind potential and high frequency of extreme weather, while offshore wind developments on the East Coast have been beset by delays, drastic cost increases, and cancelled projects.
There is a degree to which advocates for wind energy, in addition to going about their usual work, will just have to pray for the best: “We hope that developers who have leases in hand and have responsibly-sited projects that they’re working to get approved will fight to develop those projects,” Rogers told me.
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Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.
The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.