July 22, 2025 — The budget law Congress passed this month — termed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — took another swipe at the offshore wind industry, limiting substantial Biden-era tax credits that would allow wind developers to save or recoup hundreds of millions of dollars to build their projects.
Days after its passage, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to further restrict access to these tax credits for renewable energy projects. And last week, the Interior Department issued a memo adding cumbersome review procedures for wind and solar.
Trump’s order directs the Treasury Department to issue guidance and take action next month. Experts are not sure what that will look like, but these recent Congressional and executive actions could imperil two Massachusetts offshore wind projects: New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind.
Much like Trump’s day-one memorandum freezing offshore wind permitting, experts say, the impacts will depend on what stage a project is at relative to construction. For pending projects, they could be enormous.
“The abrupt termination of credits and the additional tangle of rules imposed on these credits could be quite devastating,” said Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at NYU Law.
Here’s what a rewriting of tax credits means for wind projects
President Joe Biden’s historic 2022 climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, spurred investment and buildout in the offshore wind industry and the wider clean energy sector.
It earmarked more than $360 billion for credits, loans and grants. The Oceantic Network, an industry organization, said the IRA was the “single most important piece of legislation yet passed to accelerate the adoption of offshore wind energy in the U.S.”
The credits were scheduled to phase out in 2032. But the new Trump budget law not only phases the subsidies out completely in 2030, it gives projects a new deadline to begin construction if they want the subsidies: July 4, 2026. If they start later, they face an even tighter deadline to finish: they must be operational by the end of 2027 to get the subsidies.
“Everything was going along swimmingly until this new legislation, which really accelerates the process by which projects have to start construction,” said John C. Crossley, a renewable energy attorney at K&L Gates.
It gets more complicated: the IRS defines the “beginning of construction” in two ways. First, a project can be considered “started” if the developer spends at least 5% of the project’s total cost. The second option is for the developer to undertake physical work of a “significant nature.” That can look like the construction of turbine foundations.
Under the longstanding IRS language, either one counts as starting construction.
But it’s these longtime definitions — these options for developers — that Trump is targeting through his recent executive order seeking to bring “an end to years of subsidies.” He has directed the Treasury Department to revise existing guidelines to “ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented.”