June 23, 2o25 — President Donald Trump was at a bill signing last week when he veered onto one of his favorite topics: wind energy.
“The windmills are killing our country by the way,” the president said before signing bills to block California’s gas car phase-out. Wind turbines are “garbage,” he said, as well as “bullshit,” “horrible” and “very expensive to paint.”
“We’re not going to approve windmills unless something happens that’s an emergency,” Trump said. “I guess it could happen, but we’re not doing any of them.”
That near-total opposition to wind has been particularly catastrophic to the offshore industry, squelching investments and halting ongoing projects in their tracks at a time when Northeast states are desperate for more power. POLITICO’s E&E News found that about a dozen East Coast wind projects planned during the Biden administration are now in purgatory, potentially collapsing a portfolio that could power hundreds of thousands of homes.
More projects could falter if Republicans follow through with their plans in Congress to gut clean energy tax credits, industry advocates say.
“We’ve seen a chilling effect across the industry from the administration’s stance on offshore wind, and subsequent damaging executive orders,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition.
On his first day in office, Trump withdrew all federal waters from offshore wind leasing and ordered a review of all wind leasing and permitting. His executive order directs agencies to not “issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects pending the completion of a comprehensive assessment and review.”
The White House did not answer questions from E&E News about the status of that review. But analysts do not expect it to be completed.
“It was not written with the purpose of being transparent and encouraging,” said Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Anybody in the industry must assume that barring some wholesale change of heart, perhaps driven by new policy perspectives … from the Trump administration and from the president, it’s really hard to imagine how there’s going to be a lot of progress.”