Rewind a few years, and it looked as if offshore wind might take off in the US. The Biden administration moved to open up much of the nation’s coastlines to development, blue and even a couple swing states agreed to work with the White House to speed things up, and Congress passed sweeping tax incentives for renewable energy. Now, the tide has turned, and President Donald Trump is waging a war on windmills, attempting to kill projects that are already underway.
Trump’s actions are putting tens of billions of dollars of investment at risk as developers try to forge ahead with the first batch of commercial-scale projects to break ground in the US. Even if they survive, the cloud of economic uncertainty around wind power could cast a shadow over the industry for years beyond the end of Trump’s term.
“The outlook is far dimmer than it was a year ago,” says Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF (BNEF). “It’s been non-stop bad news for the US offshore wind sector since Trump took office.”
“It’s been non-stop bad news for the US offshore wind sector since Trump took office.”
On earnings calls over the past couple weeks, companies building offshore wind farms in the US have been hammered with iterations of the same question: is your project going to make it?
Right now, a handful of wind farms are under construction off the East Coast. They’re worth $30 billion in investments and are expected to generate a combined 5.7GW of carbon pollution-free energy by the time they come online over the next four years or so.
Other US-based projects that haven’t started construction yet are at risk of being canceled or facing significant delays, according to BNEF’s latest forecast. Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie similarly only expects projects that have already secured financing and have started building to make headway with offshore construction over the next five to 10 years.
The industry as a whole has suffered from a negative feedback loop, says Stephen Maldonado, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. Projects canceled due to increasing costs scare off investors for new wind farms and factories that make turbines — keeping costs high and making new projects even more financially unfeasible. “The political situation going on here right now is just making that worse,” Maldonado says.
As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump signed a presidential memorandum that halted federal leasing and permitting for any new wind projects, either on land or at sea. The directive “has stopped most wind-energy development in its tracks,” says a complaint filed last week by 17 states and the District of Columbia, which are suing to stop the order. The Trump administration has posed an “existential threat to the wind industry,” plaintiffs contend.
The White House is calling the lawsuit a partisan attack. “Instead of working with President Trump to unleash American energy and lower prices for American families, Democrat Attorneys General are using lawfare to stop the President’s popular energy agenda,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email to The Verge.
Trump is weirdly obsessed with turbines. He spouts misinformation about windmills driving whales “freaking crazy” and leading to them washing up ashore without any evidence. The leading causes of death for whales are vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear, and conservationists have advocated for offshore wind as a way to eliminate the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis and devastating ocean ecosystems. Trump boasted in January that “no new windmills” would be built on his watch, saying they “litter” the US like “garbage in a field.”
Whether the president is tilting at an imaginary foe or not, the industry is already feeling the pain. In late April, BNEF’s estimate for offshore wind additions over the next decade fell by 56 percent compared to before Trump’s election. After that dramatic shift, it now expects only about 17GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035. That’s a far cry from former President Joe Biden’s goal of 30GW of energy from offshore wind by 2030.
The US has far more potential with its vast shorelines. Offshore wind could provide up to a quarter of the nation’s electricity by 2050, according to one analysis. So far, only a few, small wind farms have been completed in the US. The country’s first commercial-scale operation powered up last year, but it isn’t expected to become fully operational until this year. If it does, it’s supposed to provide enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.
Projects that are further along aren’t necessarily immune to the whims of the Trump administration. The president sent shockwaves through the industry when he ordered a major wind project off the coast of New York to halt construction in mid-April, even though the project had federal and state approvals in place. Construction already employed 1,500 people, according to Equinor, the Norwegian energy company building it. The Empire Wind project was 30 percent complete and had put in $1.2 billion in investments in US supply chains, Equinor says. The company is considering taking legal action, as noted in an April 31st earnings call.
“The government in the US, they have not shared with us the reason for the stop work authority. So, it is a situation where, you know, we don’t understand why,” Equinor CEO Anders Opedal said during the call. “We have always assumed that the United States of America will honor contracts and permits they have issued … so this is an unlawful action by them, and we are going to treat it like that.”
By Monday, Equinor was reportedly considering canceling Empire Wind altogether. The company has been spending $50 million a week just to maintain the project during the construction pause, according to Reuters and Bloomberg.
Two other energy companies, Dominion Energy and Ørsted, had to answer questions during earnings calls about what makes their projects in the US any less vulnerable than Equinor’s. Leadership of both companies were adamant about pushing their projects through to completion. They’re further along in construction than Equinor, which could insulate them, but that also means the companies would have more to lose.
Dominion is building the largest offshore wind farm by far, with more than double the capacity of others in construction. Its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is 55 percent complete, and construction is reportedly on schedule to wrap up next year. It’s supposed to be able to generate enough electricity for up to 660,000 homes once fully operational. It’s also situated near Virginia’s data center alley — where AI is pushing electricity demand ever higher.
When asked what the company would do if the Trump administration sent it a stop work order, CEO Bob Blue told analysts that he doesn’t expect such a pause because the project is “the fastest way to get 2.6 gigawatts on the grid to serve tech companies, defense and security installations, important American industries.”
Danish company Ørsted, the world’s leading offshore wind developer, is roughly 75 percent complete with the Revolution Wind farm expected to start operating next year off the coast of Rhode Island. It’s building an even larger wind farm called Sunrise Wind off the coast of New York that’s about 35 percent complete and due to come online in 2027.
Ørsted has been facing global headaches for years since the COVID-19 pandemic messed up supply chains and increased inflation. After canceling two New Jersey projects in 2023, the company canceled a major UK project last week, citing rising supply chain costs and interest rates.
Trump’s tariff regime is not helping. He slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports — materials used to make turbines. Those tariffs have led to rising costs for Ørsted’s US developments, adding up to a 1.2 billion impairment in Danish crowns (roughly $180 million), the company said in an earnings call. The industry has also been hit by a 20 percent tariff (only 10 percent has been implemented so far) on imports from the European Union, where the US gets most offshore wind components. Ørsted expects the tariffs on EU products to have “less than half of the impact” of steel and aluminum tariffs.
Yet another threat looms over the industry: whether Congress will act to reverse tax credits for wind projects set under the Biden administration. “It would be a killer blow,” BNEF’s Metcalfe says.
Offshore projects are more expensive and complex to build than onshore wind, which is a more mature industry in the US that already provides 10 percent of the nation’s electricity. Turbines at sea, however, are able to take advantage of higher and more consistent wind speeds that can hopefully generate electricity reliably and efficiently for population centers along coastlines. But at the moment, the nascent industry is relying on federal subsidies to gain a foothold in the US.
Those tax credits are in jeopardy as House Republicans propose phasing down key tax incentives included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The president has railed against what he calls Biden’s “green new scam,” even though red and swing states — where there’s been significant investment in new clean energy projects — benefit the most from tax credits for wind and solar energy from the IRA.
Trump isn’t alone in opposing offshore wind, of course. Fossil fuel interests, the commercial fishing industry, and some local residents concerned about turbines marring their ocean views have also opposed new offshore wind projects. A manufacturing flaw that led to a turbine failure off the coast of Massachusetts in July 2024 sent a blade plummeting into the Atlantic and left shards of fiberglass on beaches. Not only did that lead to construction delays, it also elicited a wave of headlines that stoked fears about the potential environmental impact of new wind farms.
Turbine failures are rare, luckily. And other parts of the world have managed to make more headway than the US, although recent tariff threats have created turbulence. Offshore turbines provided about 4 percent of Europe’s electricity last year. China is the leading market for offshore wind, home to more than half of global offshore capacity added last year.
Seeing successful projects can alleviate some initial fears about offshore wind and have already shifted the tone of conversations elsewhere, Metcalfe says. But they’d need a chance to get off the ground first.
