Donald Trump’s Madcap Crusade Against Wind
Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to make your electricity bills go up. As my colleague David Dayen outlined recently, he is moving heaven and earth to stop renewable-energy projects—which made up more than 95 percent of new generating capacity in the first half of this year—most especially, wind. Future blackouts are practically guaranteed.
Now Trump’s war on wind has escalated to possibly canceling a huge project that is almost finished: the Revolution Wind project, about 12 miles south of the eastern edge of Rhode Island. Construction started in 2023, and is reportedly more than 80 percent finished, with 45 out of 65 turbines installed, and power projected to start flowing next year.
But the Trump administration has issued a stop-work order on the project, with a letter from acting Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Matthew Giacona. He is supposedly worried that that construction is “carried out in a manner that provides for protection of the environment” and is “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests … and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone.” The administration is also attempting to block another wind project off the coast of Maryland, the details of which were first reported by Heatmap News and now confirmed by Bloomberg, though that one is still in its early stages.
It’s anybody’s guess as to whether Trump intends to stop these projects permanently, or is just angling to dip his beak in their funding as he recently did with Nvidia and Intel. But given his relentless anti-renewable animus, I’d guess it’s the former. Regarding Revolution Wind, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the developer Ørsted are considering legal action.
Canceling—or even delaying—the Rhode Island project in particular is so pointlessly, self-harmingly stupid that it would not have even occurred to any previous administration, including Trump’s first one. Revolution Wind would provide about 704 megawatts of reliable clean power, or enough for 350,000 homes, as well as reduce carbon emissions by more than a million tons per year. Ørsted carried out numerous infrastructure projects to move the project along, including a major upgrade of the New London port to handle the gigantic turbine blades.
Connecticut and Rhode Island, which have some of the highest electricity costs in the country, were banking on this project. It was financed by a power purchase agreement with state utilities for less than ten cents per kilowatt-hour, and without it they will have to rely even more on fossil gas–generated power, whose price is spiking across the country thanks to the data center buildout.
In short, we are talking about flushing potentially billions in investment down the toilet for no reason.
The purported justifications here are preposterous. As to the environment, this is the most anti-environment administration in American history. Nobody bending over backwards to expand coal subsidies cares about whether a wind farm harms Rhode Island fisheries or whatever. As to the exclusive economic zone, it’d be hard to imagine a better use of it than a relatively low-impact, badly needed electricity project.
As to national security, the project underwent the typical grueling regulatory review, including consultation with dozens of local governments, federal agencies, and the military. A bunch of turbines more than ten miles offshore is just not going to meaningfully interfere with the Navy or national security—except by increasing and diversifying our domestic energy supply, which is to say strengthening it.
Unusually for the Trump administration, whose decisions often turn on which toadying half-wit had the president’s ear most recently, the war on wind is personal. Trump simply loathes wind turbines (or “windmills,” as he calls them). His hatred apparently stems from an incident across the pond, when the Scottish government proposed to put a smallish wind farm off the coast of his golf course near Aberdeen. Trump hated the idea, fought the project in court for years, eventually lost, and had to pay Scotland’s legal fees to boot. The turbines are “some of the ugliest you’ve ever seen,” he said during a recent visit.
I have always found this view baffling. Of all the forms of power generation, wind turbines are surely the most aesthetically appealing. What’s not to like about a forest of big turbines, their sinuously curved blades slowly and quietly spinning as they harvest electricity from the air—especially far out to sea where they don’t even take up land? It sure looks a lot better than a smoke-belching coal power plant, or even a solar farm. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump—who every day adds additional hideously gaudy gilded ornaments to the White House, making it look steadily more like a C-tier Las Vegas brothel—has appalling taste.
In any case, Trump often complains that offshore wind is unreliable, but this is the opposite of true. Half the point of putting wind turbines offshore, which adds a lot of cost and complexity, is because the wind blows a lot harder and more steadily out in the ocean. America has stupendous offshore wind potential, estimated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at 4,249 gigawatts of turbines producing 13,567 terawatt-hours of electricity—or about three times as much as America’s entire production in 2023.
And the best place of all is a chunk of the Atlantic continental shelf stretching from the tip of Long Island to about 100 miles east of Cape Cod, where the wind is strong and the sea is shallow enough that turbines can be fixed rather than floating—which is why Revolution Wind is there in the first place, and partly why Ørsted did so many infrastructure upgrades. It could have been the first of a literal sea of turbine projects producing clean, affordable electricity for the whole region.
But not if Trump has anything to say about it. This project might get completed eventually—he tried repeatedly to stop a similar wind project off Long Island, and eventually backed down—but so long as he is president, that vast potential will remain untapped. If it’s good for America, Donald Trump is against it.
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the Prospect, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week.