Trump’s war against wind power has already killed hundreds of jobs

 Even before he took office, Donald Trump’s promise to halt all offshore wind projects upended an industry just as it was getting off the ground. Now, a freeze on wind project approvals threatens so many plans that it could undercut the country’s climate goals.

 

After the election, Shell pulled out of a major turbine project off New Jersey, and a French undersea cable maker nixed a factory in Massachusetts that was set to employ hundreds at the site of an old coal-fired power plant. On Feb. 3, New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities decided not to buy power from any wind projects in its latest round of bidding, given that two companies had pulled out and the remaining one had lost Shell as a partner. Two days later, the CEO of the Norwegian oil company Equinor, Anders Opedal, said on an earnings call that the company was cutting its global investments in renewables by half through 2027 and acknowledged the U.S. wind market was “challenging.”

 

President Trump’s Day 1 executive order freezing all approvals for offshore wind threatens to shutter dozens of additional projects. And it’s limited what even some of the most liberal politicians, who had hoped to step into the breach with their states’ climate targets, can do.

 

Ben King, associate director of the energy and climate practice at the Rhodium Group, estimated that if all the offshore wind projects being built or applying for permits on the East Coast were completed, it would cut the country’s carbon output by about 50 million tons annually. While that only represents 3.5 percent of the power sector’s 2024 emissions, King said, it’s equal to 131 gas-fired power plants.

 

Trump’s aim to dismantle U.S. climate policy has put increased emphasis on state and local governments’ efforts to shift the nation away from fossil fuels. The U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 states that formed during Trump’s first term, remains focused on cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions at least in half by the end of the decade compared with 2005 levels.

 

But for several East Coast states, their ambitious climate targets cannot be met without a huge amount of electricity generated through offshore wind. Those proposed projects — which lie near New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Virginia — cannot happen without federal approval.

 

“They’ve established very clear, long-term energy goals that have very specific targets for offshore energy,” said Stephanie Francoeur, spokeswoman for the Oceantic Network, an association of companies in the offshore energy supply chain. “There are states that won’t be able to meet those goals or even reach their short-term demand without offshore wind.”

 

New York state, for example, pledged in its 2019 climate law to generate 70 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and to build 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2035, about 68 times more than the electricity now produced by the state’s sole offshore wind project.

 

Trump’s promise of no new wind turbines threatens three New York projects that could deliver 5,600 megawatts, capacity that is essential to reaching the state’s 2035 target. With offshore wind farms often taking a decade to complete from planning through construction, the delays make the already ambitious goals harder to meet.

 

“It’s not a nail in the coffin, but it’s a huge negative because it scares away folks on the investment side, and it could interfere with folks on the implementation side, if he decides to really revoke permits or prevent a permit that we thought we were going to get from coming to realization,” said Michael Menser, an earth and environmental sciences professor at the City University of New York.

 

State power agency NYSERDA is considering whether to commit New York to buying power from those three projects if they are built, an essential financial buy-in that such long-term projects cannot move forward without.

 

New Jersey has only one project with full federal permits that may be able to move ahead. That project would generate less than half of the electricity needed to meet Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s goal of 3,500 megawatts in offshore wind power by 2030.

 

Another two projects, which the state already has under contract and taken together would allow New Jersey to reach that goal, still need approvals from the Trump administration.

 

Without those and other offshore wind projects, East Coast states will burn more natural gas and struggle to meet their climate goals, said Julia Hoos, head analyst for the eastern United States at Aurora Energy Research, an energy market analytics provider. That in turn threatens the country’s overall goals, since big coastal cities generate a large share of U.S. emissions.

 

What comes next?

 

Many people in the wind industry believe that Trump’s policy means that wind projects are safe if they are under construction and already have federal permits. About five projects fall in that category, ranging from Dominion Energy’s project off the coast of Virginia to Massachusetts’s Vineyard Wind farm.

 

Equinor said last week that it remained committed to building its fully permitted Empire Wind Project in waters off New York. Onshore construction has already begun, with offshore construction expected to begin in May.

 

Danish company Orsted similarly told investors it remains committed to building its two permitted offshore projects in the United States, even while cutting its wider renewables investments.

 

The industry is looking for clarity from the Interior Department, and much depends on who Secretary Doug Burgum appoints to head its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore leases and the most critical construction permit.

 

As governor of North Dakota, Burgum favored onshore wind, which generates 36 percent of the state’s electricity. How he views offshore wind is less certain. At his confirmation hearing last month, Burgum said projects that make sense and are within the law will continue, and the United States needed an “all of the above” strategy to meet energy demand.

 

“We need all forms of electricity,” Burgum said. “We’re short of electricity in this country.”

 

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey), who helped write Trump’s wind executive order, said that the intent was for all projects to be reviewed in a process led by the interior secretary even if they are already fully permitted. He said he expected many of the projects to be blocked.

 

“They’re pretty much shutting them down now,” Van Drew said.

 

“If you’ve got your permits and you’ve got your lease, you still have to stop,” he added. “Around the whole East Coast, they are pretty much dead.”

But there’s tension within the Republican Party, since some GOP-leaning areas benefit from offshore wind development.

 

Rep. Nick LaLota (R-New York), whose Long Island district has the country’s only operational commercial-scale wind farm, said in an interview that Trump has valid concerns over the impact on marine life and the fishing industry. LaLota said he wants to see the administration conduct an unbiased study while approvals are frozen.

 

“Renewable energy, including wind, is important to not only my district, but my state and the entire country,” LaLota said.

 

The fight over wind policy will heat up this spring as Congress takes up Trump’s effort to roll back much of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax incentives that benefit investment in wind energy. About a dozen Republican House members have argued that the law’s clean energy tax credit should be preserved even if other areas are rolled back.

 

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” LaLota said.

 

Wind advocates say that to meet the projected massive growth in energy demand, driven in large part by data centers needed to stay ahead in the artificial intelligence race, the United States needs every source of electricity it can get.

 

Wind project developers say the worst-case scenario is that all wind projects go on hold under Trump and they need to wait to develop their federal leases until he leaves office. Industry observers say the Trump administration is unlikely to pull back the leases, because that would require the government to give back billions of dollars in proceeds.

 

But long delays can run up costs for companies, make it impossible to meet contracts to deliver power to states by agreed dates and scare banks away from financing projects, Hoos said.

 

Investments and jobs at risk

 

The offshore wind industry has had a turbulent five years since the pandemic. Soaring inflation made agreements with states to provide electricity no longer economically viable, high interest rates drove up costs and supply chain bottlenecks plagued the industry.

 

Offshore was starting to get back on its feet under President Joe Biden, whose administration sold billions of dollars in offshore leases.

 

“There was definitely more solid ground that people were standing on to be able to make good financial decisions. Now that certainty has really been removed,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of Turn Forward, an offshore wind industry group.

 

Wind industry associations, including Oceantic and Turn Forward, say they expect some congressional Republicans to defend projects in peril because of the thousands of jobs the industry is expected to create, many of them in red states. The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, has come out in favor of continuing Dominion’s project, since the utility’s customers could be on the hook for more than $6 billion in sunk costs. Even states far from the East Coast, such as Louisiana and Texas, are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to build parts or the massive ships needed to haul turbines.

 

“The federal actions that were recently announced effectively threatened to strand all of these investments that have been made to date,” said Francoeur of Oceantic.

 

The whole offshore industry is waiting for the administration to spell out exactly how it will implement Trump’s orders, Bright said. The uncertainty, she added, “makes it just very challenging to be able to make just smart financial decisions on massive infrastructure projects. Which is ultimately what these are, billions and billions of dollars.”

 

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