Offshore wind is a fledgling industry in the U.S. — one that, until this week, was poised for renewal after a slew of cancelled projects. The Biden administration had set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of projects by 2030 (approximately a 150-fold increase from the current amount of offshore wind generation nationwide), and state-level commitments are even higher. But President Donald Trump has long nursed an apparent vendetta against wind energy.
On Monday, his first day in office, Trump fulfilled a campaign promise and issued an executive action pausing new permits and lease sales for wind energy on federal lands and waters, pending a review by federal agencies. “We don’t want windmills in this country,” he told Fox News.
As a result, trade unions and low-income port communities that were depending on construction jobs from those projects will be disappointed; some coastal states’ climate targets will be harder to meet; and the prospects for grid reliability in the face of the expected nationwide growth in energy demand are a little less bright.
Besides its climate value as a form of carbon-free energy, offshore wind plays a useful role in a power grid alongside solar energy and onshore wind. Like other renewable technologies, its power is intermittent — but because its availability depends on different environmental factors from those resources, offshore wind can be thought of as “a form of storage,” explained Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley and a former U.S. Science Envoy.
There are three operating wind farms in American waters today, off the coasts of Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia. Of these, only one — New York’s South Fork Wind Farm — is a large-scale project. But many others are in various stages of development — and among the major open questions around the executive action is whether projects that have already received leases and permits will face jeopardy. “I’m worried about not only future projects but also about the current ones,” said Kammen.
The executive action notes that the offshore leasing pause does not affect “rights under existing leases in the withdrawn areas” — but also mandates that the Secretary of the Interior conduct a review of “the necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and of the “legal bases for such removal.”
One such legal tool available to Trump is to simply drop the federal government’s defense of permits that are being contested in court.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, is currently being sued over the permits it awarded to at least four wind projects: Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind, New York’s South Fork Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and the Maryland Offshore Wind Project.
Timothy Fox, managing director of the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Grist in an email that the executive action “strongly suggests … that the Trump Administration is unlikely to vigorously defend offshore wind project permits issued by the Biden Administration,” and moreover will “encourage offshore wind foes to file additional legal challenges” against existing projects.
But there may be a countervailing incentive for the administration to avoid dropping its defenses of the projects, according to Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO: the fact that BOEM is also responsible for awarding permits for offshore oil drilling — which Trump hopes to supercharge.
“I think their legal calculus is going to take into account: ‘If we simply fold the cards, what does that do to this agency’s authority?’ They don’t want to give up that authority,” Crowley said. “In my experience no federal administration wants to give up any authority that it has.”
“If they want BOEM to approve offshore drilling, and they ceded that authority on offshore wind, that’s going to allow people that don’t want offshore drilling to happen to point to this decision as a precedent,” Crowley added.
Fox characterized this as a “fair argument,” agreeing that “if the Trump Administration were to firmly side with petitioners, and if the court(s) were to agree, it could set a precedent that sets a high environmental bar for other energy sectors (e.g., offshore oil and gas).” But there may be ways around this dilemma.
The administration could simply invoke arguments that are particular to the environmental effects of offshore wind and don’t apply to drilling, which largely occurs in different regions and has different ecological impacts. “For example, the Trump Administration could argue that individual offshore wind projects and their cumulative impacts could negatively impact the North Atlantic right whale, a listed endangered species,” Fox wrote — an issue that has little bearing on drilling operations.
Like many in the flurry of Trump’s first-day executive orders, the ambiguity creates uncertainty — and leaves some room for hope for stakeholders in the wind industry.
“One of the ways to interpret what Trump is doing is creating the situation where he can eventually take credit for the offshore wind industry continuing and expanding,” Crowley said. “If we’ve learned anything from Trump, he’ll take credit for good things and deflect blame for the bad things.”
