Few clean energy sectors have been threatened as directly by Donald Trump as offshore wind. The president-elect vowed on the campaign trail to end offshore wind development via executive order ​“on day one†of his second term.
Trump has nurtured a hatred for the industry since at least 2006, when he began fighting a wind project off the coast of his golf course in Scotland. He waged a years-long legal battle to block it and ultimately lost before the U.K. Supreme Court in 2015.
But could the Trump administration really stop offshore wind in its tracks?
Experts say Trump wonâ€t be able to deliver on his campaign promise to kill off the industry in a single day, but his administration could stop some development and make things much harder for proposed and planned projects. This, in turn, could stall development of a clean energy resource that is expected to be cheaper than fossil-fueled power once it scales up. That would be good news for power plants that want to protect their market share from cheaper and cleaner competition, but bad news for tens of millions of utility customers and the broader economy.
The Biden administration set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, an energy source that is core to several coastal states†decarbonization plans. This sector in the U.S. is fast-growing — tens of billions of dollars in public and private investment have poured into it in recent years. But itâ€s still a new industry here, and supply-chain problems and inflation-driven cost escalations have led to project delays and cancellations. Because of those challenges, offshore wind development is already far off-track to meet federal and state goals.
And now comes a newly hostile political environment.
The federal government controls the waters off U.S. coastlines, so it can dictate the siting of offshore wind projects — a notable difference between offshore wind and other types of clean energy. The U.S. Department of Interior puts potential wind development sites out to bid in lease sales.
The Trump administration will have the power to halt those lease sales, and it will be able to slow the processing of key federal permits for projects already in the pipeline.
“Thereâ€s a sense that this change will bring a lot of regulatory uncertainty at the federal level,†said Jeremy McDiarmid, managing director and general counsel for Advanced Energy United. ​“All these things create uncertainty in the marketplace, and that makes financing more expensive.â€
Shares of European wind-power giants including Danish energy firm Ørsted and wind-turbine manufacturers Vestas and Nordex fell after Trumpâ€s victory, following a broader pattern for clean energy stocks, as markets reacted to fears of a rollback of U.S. clean energy incentives.
Trumpâ€s pledge to end the industry came during a May campaign stop at a New Jersey coastal resort city thatâ€s been fighting offshore wind development over concerns that itâ€ll harm the fishing industry and spoil views from shorefront properties. During his speech, Trump repeated a claim from offshore wind opponents that the projects kill whales — a theory that federal researchers have debunked.
How realistic are Trumpâ€s threats?
“Trump statements of ​‘Iâ€m going to end offshore wind on day one†— that cannot happen,†said John Northington Jr., government affairs adviser and member of the public policy and law practice group at K&L Gates.
After theyâ€re signed, executive orders face potential legal challenges that can delay implementation, Northington said. That process takes time and may not lead to the intended result. Northington has relevant experience: He was previously an adviser at DOI, which oversees the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the agency responsible for managing offshore wind leases.
“Look at what President Biden was saying on the campaign trail to end offshore oil and gas,†he said. Despite that pledge, ​“weâ€ve never been producing more oil and gas on federal lands,†an example of the gap between campaign promises and governing outcomes.
Early in his term, Biden issued an executive order calling for a halt to federal offshore drilling leases and review of offshore oil and gas policy. But after more than a year of back-and-forth legal battles, the order was mooted by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains provisions that link expanding offshore drilling leases with expanding offshore wind leases.
Trump has also said he will undo the Inflation Reduction Act, a move that would strip hundreds of billions of dollars of federal clean-energy tax credits from clean energy sectors, including offshore wind. Most industry and political observers have discounted the odds of a full repeal, however, since the majority of the investments spurred by the lawâ€s tax credits and incentives are in Republican states and congressional districts.
Losing tax credits would harm wind more than other energy sectors, according to a BloombergNEF report released the week before the election. ​“Offshore wind is more vulnerable to tax-credit repeal because itâ€s more capital-intensive, there is higher reliance on policy, and there is greater site-specific resource dependency,†Atin Jain, BNEF wind power specialist, told Canary Media. The research firm estimates that a full repeal of the IRAâ€s tax credits could cut its current forecast of 39 gigawatts of offshore wind in the U.S. by 2035 nearly in half, to 21.5 gigawatts, he said.
Even if the IRAâ€s tax credits for offshore wind arenâ€t repealed, projects that have yet to secure permits from BOEM could face challenges, said Felisa Sanchez, counsel in K&L Gatesâ€s maritime and finance practice groups.
“With Trump, the primary concern is a set of delays — permitting delays, approval delays,†she said.
This dynamic occurred during the first Trump administration, when industry backers accused BOEM of ​“slow-walking†offshore wind permits for the 806-megawatt Vineyard Wind farm in Massachusetts, the first U.S. project to approach anything close to the scale of Europeâ€s offshore wind installations.
Future permitting snags could cause problems for other projects being planned off the Massachusetts coast such as SouthCoast Wind, a 2.4-gigawatt project that expects to have all its necessary permits by mid-2025.
