Offshore wind leasing is officially dead under Trump todayheadline

Offshore wind leasing is effectively dead in the U.S. following a Trump administration order issued last week.

Large swaths of U.S. waters that had been identified by federal agencies as ideal for offshore wind are no longer eligible for such developments under an Interior Department statement released last Wednesday.

In the four-sentence statement, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) said the U.S. government is ​“de-designating over 3.5 million acres of unleased federal waters previously targeted for offshore wind development across the Gulf of America, Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight, California, Oregon, and the Central Atlantic.”

The move comes just a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his staff to stop ​“preferential treatment for wind projects” and falsely called wind energy ​“unreliable.” Analysts say that offshore wind power can be a reliable form of carbon-free energy, especially in New England, where the region’s grid operator has called it critical to grid stability. It also follows the Trump administration’s monthslong assault on the industry, which has included multiple attacks on in-progress projects.

The outlook was already grim for new offshore wind leasing activity following President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that introduced a temporary ban on the practice. Wednesday’s announcement makes that policy more definitive. Wind power advocates say it will erase several years of work from federal agencies and local communities to determine the best possible areas for wind development.

“My read on this is that there is not going to be any leasing for offshore wind in the near future,” said a career employee at the Interior Department, who Canary Media granted anonymity so they could speak freely without fear of retribution.

Figuring out the best spot to place offshore wind is an involved undertaking. The proposed areas start off enormous and, according to the Interior staffer, undergo a careful, multiyear winnowing process to settle on the official ​“wind energy area.” Smaller lease areas are later carved out of these broader expanses.

Take the process for designating the wind energy area known as ​“Central Atlantic 2,” which started back in 2023 and is now dead in the water.

The draft area — or ​“call area” — started out as a thick belt roughly 40 miles wide and reached from the southernmost tip of New Jersey to the northern border of South Carolina, according to maps on BOEM’s website. Multiple agencies, including the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, and NASA, then provided input on where that initial area might have been problematic. NASA, for example, maintains a launch site on Virginia’s Wallops Island and in 2024 found that nearby wind turbines could interfere with the agency’s instrumentation and radio frequencies.

The winnowing didn’t stop there. By 2024, according to BOEM’s website, its staff was hosting in-person public meetings from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Morehead City, North Carolina, to gather input from fishermen, tourism outfitters, and other stakeholders. Under a wind-friendly administration, a final designation and lease sale notice would have likely been released this year or by 2026, based on a timeline posted to BOEM’s website.

But the Trump administration is no friend to offshore wind.

Trump officials have repeatedly targeted wind projects by pulling permits and even halting one wind farm during construction. Last month, Trump’s ​“big, beautiful bill” sent federal tax credits to an early grave, requiring wind developers who want to use the incentives to either start construction by July 2026 or place turbines in service by the end of 2027. The move is particularly devastating for offshore projects not already underway. Currently, five major offshore wind farms are under construction in the U.S., and when they come online, they will help states from Virginia to Massachusetts meet their rising energy demand with carbon-free power.

Last Wednesday’s order halts all work on Central Atlantic 2 and similar areas, like one near Guam, and also revokes completely finalized wind energy areas with strong state support. One example is in the Gulf of Maine, where Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, has been a fierce advocate for the emerging renewable sector.

These wind energy areas could hypothetically be re-designated by a future administration or the policy reversed, according to the Interior Department employee. Still, in the best case, that means developers will have to wait several more years for new lease areas to become available, further slowing down an industry whose projects already take many years to go through permitting and construction.