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If even only a few of these ideas are enacted, it would be a harbinger of doom for wind energy in America.
Major groups in the anti-offshore wind movement are going big, submitting a lengthy policy wish list to the Trump transition team, according to documents obtained and first reported by Heatmap News.
Key organizations in the movement against offshore wind submitted a draft executive order “on the suspension of offshore wind development” to the transition team. According to the draft, not only are activists asking for a pause on new permits for offshore wind but also for a stop-work order on all projects currently under construction. They’re also asking for the Health and Human Services Department to become a weapon against the growth of renewable energy, requesting studies into the health and environmental effects of wind turbines and transmission cables.
If the Trump team follows through on even some of the ideas in the draft executive order, it would be a huge win for a nascent anti-renewables uprising in America. It would also be a harbinger of pain to come for wind energy in America under Trump. At the very least, it shows activists believe the next president has many powers at his disposal to make offshore wind developers’ lives miserable.
Mandy Davis, president of REACT Alliance, told Heatmap it had submitted the draft executive order to the transition team, and that REACT was the primary group behind the document. Davis is also head of the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance, a new country-wide coalition of local groups opposed to offshore wind.
Davis said the draft order demonstrates the myriad ways she thinks the incoming administration can curtail wind development beyond a pause on new permits. “Our role is going to be determined to a great degree by what our new administration is doing,” she told Heatmap. “We also have to be really, really cognizant of the fact that even though the federal government is going to put major monkey wrenches in the works … it’s going to take a while.”
We’re still watching and waiting to see if Trump follows through with his promise to stop offshore wind in its tracks on Day 1. New Jersey Republican congressman Jeff Van Drew said in a statement Monday that Trump’s team is working with his office to draft an order that “halt[s] offshore wind turbine activities” on the East Coast and the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration.”
It is worth noting that Van Drew is one of the anti-offshore wind’s favorite allies in Congress. But it is unclear to what extent – if any – that the activists’ draft executive order obtained by Heatmap is winding up in the product Van Drew and his staff are working on with the Trump team. Representatives for Van Drew’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the draft executive order.
It’s hard to fathom the extent of damage even a work stoppage order would have on the American offshore wind industry. Roughly 5.8 gigawatts of electricity capacity are under construction offshore and more than 8 gigawatts of projects have been fully permitted but haven’t begun construction, according to data shared with Heatmap News that was compiled by Christian Roselund, a policy analyst seasoned in the renewables industry. At least 10 gigawatts of additional capacity is currently in the federal review process and would be stymied by a halt at the permitting level. Taken together, the proposals in the draft could take millions of homes’ worth of carbon-free electricity off the table indefinitely.
A source within the offshore wind industry who requested anonymity to speak candidly said, if enacted, the proposals in the draft executive order would “lay off thousands of Americans” and potentially lead to work stoppages in other links in the industry’s supply chain, like shipyards in Louisiana and steel plants in the Midwest.
Jason Ryan, a spokesperson from American Clean Power, provided Heatmap a statement after initial publication of this story: “Executive orders restricting offshore wind energy undermine U.S. national security and job growth. Energy dominance requires a true ‘all of the above energy’ approach that unleashes our nation’s diverse resources to meet surging demand.”
What’s in the draft order?
In addition to pausing permits, the draft executive order calls on the incoming administration to:
According to emails and other documents reviewed by Heatmap, the draft executive order also involved the work of Lisa Quattrocki Knight, president of the Rhode Island anti-offshore wind organization Green Oceans and a board member of the National Offshore-Wind Opposition Alliance.
Along with the draft executive order, Heatmap obtained other documents with Green Oceans’ letterhead addressed to the incoming administration, calling on it to “justify removing all permitted wind farm projects off the eastern coast of the U.S.” under multiple potential legal authorities including the National Emergencies Act, the Defense Production Act, and Federal Power Act.
Knight did not respond to requests for an interview. A spokesperson for Green Oceans contacted by Heatmap confirmed the organization played a role in crafting the draft executive order and provided a statement that the “draft Executive Order was developed as part of our broader efforts to provide science-based, actionable recommendations to decision-makers, regardless of political affiliation.”
“We believe that meaningful environmental progress requires bipartisan cooperation, and we remain committed to working with all leaders who share our vision of a sustainable future,” the statement read.
The documents also show the draft was endorsed by key groups fighting offshore wind in the New Jersey and New York region, including Protect Our Coast Long Island and Save the East Coast, as well as local opposition groups based on the West Coast and in New England. Many of these organizations will be participating in a national day of protest this Saturday.
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And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.
Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”
Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.
What are you referencing when you say, ‘the wind industry’s strategy is failing’?
Anyone in the climate space, in the clean energy space, the worst thing you can do is go silent and pretend that this is just going to go away. Even if it’s the president and the administration delivering the attacks, I think there’s an important strategy that’s been lacking in the wind and other sectors that I don’t think has been effective. There was a recent E&E News story that noted a couple of wind developers when asked for comment just say, “No comment.” This to me misses a really big opportunity to not get in a fight with people but talk about the benefits of wind.
Not taking advantage of milestones like ground breaking or construction starting is a missed opportunity to drive public opinion. If you lose support in public opinion, you’re going to lose support from public officials, because they largely follow public opinion.
And there’s no way that’s going to change if you don’t take the opportunities to talk about the benefits that wind can provide, in terms of good-paying local jobs or supplying more electrons to the grid. By almost any measure the strategy employed so far has not really worked.
Okay, but what is the wind industry strategy that isn’t working? What are they doing to rebut attacks on the technology, on property values, on the environment?
We’re not hearing them. We’re not hearing those arguments.
You can’t let criticisms go unanswered.It would better serve the industry and these companies to push back against criticisms. It’s not like you can’t anticipate what they are. And what do you have to lose? You’re in the worst position of any energy sector in this political moment. It would be nice to see some fight and sharp campaign skills and strategic effort in terms of communication. And there’s no strategic value from what I can tell in [being silent].
I understand not wanting to pick a fight with folks who hold your fate in their hands, but there’s a way to thread a needle that isn’t antagonizing anybody but also making sure the facts have been heard. And that’s been missing.
You’d specifically said the industry should stop ‘being paralyzed in fear and start going on offense.’ What does that look like to you?
Taking every opportunity to get your message out there. The lowest hanging fruit is when a reporter comes and asks you, What do you think about this criticism? You should definitely reply. It’s lifting up third-party voices that are benefiting from a specific project, talking about the economic impacts more broadly, talking about the benefits to the grid.
There’s a whole number of tools in the toolbox to put to use but the toolboxes remain shut thus far. Targeted paid media, elevating the different voices and communities that are going to resonate with different legislators, and certainly the facts are helpful. Also having materials prepared, like validators and frequently asked questions and answers.
You’re trying to win. You’re trying to get your project to be successful and deliver jobs and tax revenue. And I think it would be wise for companies to look at the playbooks of electoral campaigns, because there’s lots of tools that campaigns use.
How do renewable energy developers get around the problem of partisanship? How do you get outta that through a campaign approach?
These projects are decided locally. It’s deciding who the decision-makers are and not just letting opponents who are getting talking points through right-wing media show up and reiterate these talking points. Oftentimes, there’s no one on the pro side even showing up at all, and it makes it really easy for city councils to oppose projects. They’re losing by forfeit. We can’t keep doing that.