Offshore Wind Faces Its ‘Worst Case Scenario’ Under Trump

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump said he wanted to stop all offshore wind projects on Day One back in office. One month into his latest administration, renewables developers and climate advocates are privately very worried he’s much closer to pulling it off than they had ever thought possible.

Trump issued an executive order on January 20 halting new approvals for many wind projects, including all offshore wind. Since then, government officials have quickly and quietly given the industry the cold shoulder, all but halting permitting activity. Some agencies flat out told companies and lobbyists they wouldn’t talk to wind developers. Public meetings and webinars for new offshore wind projects have been canceled, including relatively benign informational sessions scheduled by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a quasi-independent science and research entity underneath the Energy Department. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management told one developer, Ocean Winds, that it would not give the company an updated timetable for decisions on its proposed Bluepoint Wind project off the coasts of New York and New Jersey, defying a recent update to federal permitting law.

“I feel like we’re operating on a worst case scenario,” said Shayna Steingard, a senior policy specialist for offshore wind at the National Wildlife Federation. “This is kind of our worst fears.”

Offshore wind is incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of federal agencies. It’s been that way since President George W. Bush Jr. enacted the Energy Policy Act of 2005, creating a process for developing wind in the Outer Continental Shelf. Not only must every offshore wind project go through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, but they must also get Clean Water Act permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and a range of environmental permits from the Environmental Protection Agency and Fish and Wildlife Service. There are also less intuitively related agencies involved in the process, including the U.S. Coast Guard, which has butted heads with offshore wind developers even under friendlier administrations.

The Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, declined to comment for this story. So did the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, telling Heatmap that the scientific institution “is operating under strict guidance to refer all media queries involving the new administration” to the Energy Department’s main public affairs office, which did not respond to requests for comment.

But by all appearances, offshore wind has been frozen out of the U.S. entirely.

Panic! at the Wind Farm

On earnings calls, companies already wrestling with higher project costs are starting to talk about U.S. offshore wind in especially grim terms. The tone reminds me of my past life reporting on minerals extraction projects threatened by political violence and military conflict.

After New Jersey all but abandoned its would-be first offshore wind project, Atlantic Shores, its project developers — Shell and EDF — wrote it off as a major financial loss. Luc Rémont, CEO of EDF, told analysts Friday that it was “realistic given the degree of uncertainty and the degree of threat” from Trump’s activities “to just depreciate” the assets, according to a translation of the call posted by the company. The CFO of Equinor — the developer behind Empire Wind, one of the few offshore wind proposals expected to start construction this year — told investors that “there is remaining uncertainty in” the project and openly weighed the “significant cancellation costs” against the benefits remaining to be gleaned from the Inflation Reduction Act, which are themselves potentially under threat in Congress. (Equinor told me in a statement that the project remains on track to begin construction this year.)

Top executives are ruling out any offshore wind development that might need federal permitting. Rasmus Errboe, the CEO of Ørsted, told analysts on its earnings update that the company was no longer committed to moving forward with any offshore assets in the U.S. except the Revolution and Sunrise wind projects, which received many of their permits under Biden. Projects that haven’t meaningfully started permitting yet are being mothballed — BP, for instance, told me that it withdrew state-level permitting applications for its Beacon Wind proposal in New York to work on “the project’s design and configuration.” Ocean Winds, the developer of Bluepoint Wind, did not respond to requests for comment about whether that project was still in the works after BOEM refused to update its permitting timeline.

In other pockets of the offshore wind space, there’s a clear disconnect between what companies are saying and the risk Trump poses to their immediate futures. Take Dominion Energy, the investor-owned utility behind the proposed Coastal Virginia Offshore wind farm, whose executives recently told analysts they thought their permits would be safe from political meddling. Mere hours earlier, I had reported that Trump’s Justice Department was working with anti-wind organizations to stretch out and delay litigation targeting the project.

Dominion responded to that news with a statement insisting the project would be “completed on-time in late 2026.” The company’s media team did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, including a question about whether it expects to receive a Coast Guard authorization for power cable work that the Biden administration did not seem to complete before Trump entered office.

At the same time, as I first reported, conservative lawyers and wind critics are privately lobbying the Trump administration to re-examine whale interaction permits issued under Biden, a request that if granted would involve overturning government opinions by career marine biologists. “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go,” Paul Kamenar, an attorney involved in the effort to rescind the permits, told me.

The request has prompted an outcry, including from The Washington Post editorial board and some free market groups. Renewables industry representatives have insisted that rescinding permits for offshore wind projects already under construction would drive up energy costs and make brown outs more likely in areas with rising demand on the grid. They also were quick to point out how many of the people requesting this reconsideration were climate deniers. “The groups involved in this effort have a well-documented history of spreading false claims about renewable energy,” American Clean Power spokesperson Jason Ryan told me.

The Danger Zone

The risk of an electricity price spike means there’s also a danger that Trump’s vise grip on offshore wind leads to a new generation of fossil-based infrastructure on the East Coast, and every plausible scenario in which the Northeast truly draws down carbon emissions goes down the drain.

My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written about how the models used to project U.S. climate goals consistently show that the sector must provide a marginal but still significant percentage of future power. A big reason? Geography. The Northeast’s space constraints and high real estate prices mean it is politically perilous to get utility scale carbon-free power to the Northeast without building turbines in the sea, and state level climate goals become almost impossible to meet if projects can’t get through the permitting process before 2029. New York, for example, planned to use offshore wind to get 9 gigawatts of carbon-free power by 2035; Empire Wind — the only project currently in progress with a timeline that could help the state meet that goal — is nowhere near enough on its own.

The Trump administration has so far said little about what it wants to replace these projects with, although given its insistence that we’re in an energy emergency, one would hope the answer is … something. Thankfully, a hint came last week during a Fox Business segment on Trump’s war against offshore wind. Appearing on the show Varney & Co., Trump’s former DOE Secretary Dan Brouillette, who recently departed a brief stint as head of the utility trade group Edison Electric Institute, urged blue states with “environmental goals” to consider “alternative ways” to meet them — that is, natural gas pipelines.

“I wouldn’t be fooled by headlines that suggest that the collapse of the offshore wind industry means that we are somehow going to miss an environmental goal,” Brouilette said. “We could build natural gas pipelines into places like Boston and use natural gas instead of perhaps fuel oil or diesel to produce electricity. That would dramatically reduce the emissions profile of those states.” (Brouillette also spoke briefly about nuclear power but did not get into specifics.)

For the record, while gas-powered energy produces fewer carbon emissions than other fossil fuels, the math on atmospheric greenhouse gas clearly shows that natural gas is incompatible with any plausible scenario that slows, stalls or undoes global climate change and the damage it is causing the planet.

The multitude of ways offshore wind could die by a thousand cuts is why only a precious few people who work in the industry were willing to go on the record for this story. Speaking anonymously, some in the business admit they see this situation in autocratic terms and are afraid of giving the Trump team ideas. One person who’d been in offshore wind for a decade described the behavior of regulators as “systematically, across the board, undermining any credibility to enter into a legal agreement,” which they said “genuinely felt like the end of our nation.” Another told me the feeling in the industry is that “the fundamental rule of law seems to be in enough question to pose a finance risk.”

As is the rule with the Trump administration, some of this government behavior may wind up being ruled illegal. But when administration officials seem willing and able to go the added extralegal mile to accomplish their policy objectives, there’s hardly any comfort in a years-long legal battle. Not when money is the fuel that runs offshore wind, and a noxious combination of inflation and grassroots opposition was already making projects difficult to complete.

“These are definitely challenging times,” acknowledged Hillary Bright, executive director for D.C. offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, putting the stakes in stark terms. “I really hope the administration can find a place in their energy dominance agenda to support our multi-billion dollar projects creating American jobs that can light up millions of homes in the near future.”