Saving Seafood

Trump moves to restrict wind power tax credits

July 8, 2025 — Days after the Republican majority in Congress sharply reduced incentives for wind and solar energy projects, President Trump issued a new executive order to set new timeline limits for developers to qualify for tax credits.

“For too long, the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar,” states the order issued late Monday. “Reliance on so-called ‘green’ subsidies threatens national security by making the United States dependent on supply chains controlled by foreign adversaries.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Senate budget vote set mixed prospects for offshore wind

July 3, 2025 — The U.S. Senate’s squeaker 51-50 vote to approve the Trump administration’s program agenda appeared to strike a huge blow against offshore wind energy and other renewable energy development.

But opponents of offshore wind insist the legislation does not go far enough. The final version pulled back a proposed excise tax that would have penalized wind energy developers, after Iowa Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, both R-Iowa, opposed it for their state’s wind energy generation and manufacturing industry.

“The Senate bill looks like it has a 2027 ‘placed in service’ cutoff for new solar/wind subsidies,” wrote Alex Epstein, a prominent activist and fossil fuels advocate, in a fiery July 1 social media post widely shared among offshore wind opponents. “But one last-minute paragraph makes it worthless – because projects making a recoverable 5% investment in the next 12 months are exempt!”

President Trump pledged to stop all projects in U.S. waters “on day one” of his second presidency and issued an order hours after his Jan. 20 inauguration to implement that ban. In mid-April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered a halt to work on Equinor’s Empire Wind 814-megawatt project off New York, thrilling project opponents.

But a month later, the Trump administration relented, after making a deal with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for permitting new natural gas pipelines from the Marcellus gas fields in Pennsylvania through New York State.

With the July 1 Senate vote, offshore oil and gas interests appeared to be clear winners. With final passage still required in the House – and continued criticism by the hardline Republican conservatives’ caucus – industry advocates pushed for support.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Offshore Wind Projects Continue to Add to U.S.-Flagged Fleet

July 2, 2025 — The next offshore service operation vessel (SOV), ECO Liberty, was christened to officially enter the U.S. fleet in support of the offshore wind sector. The vessel, which was completed in May, has been in jeopardy after the Trump administration suspended work on the Empire Wind project, but with work back underway, the vessel was named in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 28 by Louisiana’s First Lady Sharon Landry.

The 262-foot (80-meter) hybrid-powered ECO Liberty will be homeported at New York’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, where more than 2,000 workers are constructing the staging facility, O&M base, and control center for Empire Wind. The ECO Liberty will be deployed to support ongoing marine construction in the lease area and eventually serve as the floating home for Empire Wind’s skilled workers when stationed offshore.

The vessel is 5,700 GT. It provides accommodations for up to 60 workers and is designed to remain offshore at the site to support the construction and later maintenance operations.

The vessel was built by Edison Chouset Offshore, which continues to own the vessel through its offshore division. It will be operating on a long-term charter to Empire Wind, which is being developed by Equinor. Empire Wind is located 15 to 30 miles southeast of New York’s Long Island and spans 80,000 acres, with water depths of between approximately 75 and 135 feet. Offshore work started this spring for the project, which will have a capacity for 810 MW when completed.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

MASSACHUSETTS: Offshore wind power contracts delayed, again, to 2026

July 1, 2025 — The next round of offshore wind power projects for Massachusetts moved even further out of reach Monday when state officials got word that project developers and utilities will not meet Monday’s already-delayed target for finalizing contracts and likely won’t submit contracts for state approval until 2026.

The delays affect two projects proposed off Massachusetts, SouthCoast Wind and New England Wind, both of which have plans to use the Port of New Bedford to support construction or long-term operations.

The latest delays are due to “federal level activities,” a letter to the state says — a reference to the Trump administration’s freeze of new offshore wind permits.

Massachusetts selected 2,678 megawatts of offshore wind power, spread across three projects, in September 2024, kicking off contract negotiations. One of those projects, Vineyard Wind 2, has since removed itself from consideration. Another, SouthCoast Wind, has announced a delay of at least two years. Massachusetts gets no meaningful energy from offshore wind, almost nine years after a clean energy law set the state on a path of decarbonization.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

MARYLAND: Gov. stands behind offshore wind for OC coast

June 27, 2025 — As President Donald Trump continues to tweet against windmills, Maryland’s governor says his office hasn’t been in communication with the White House over a proposed offshore mid-Atlantic wind farm that’s in the final stages of approval at the state level.

“No, we haven’t had any communication with the Trump administration on this project specifically,” Moore said in an interview Tuesday with OC Today-Dispatch. The governor is in Ocean City for the annual summer conference of the Maryland Municipal League.

“I know some of the challenges that the administration has and we hear them loud and clear,” he added. “The thing that I want for everybody to hear loud and clear is that in the state of Maryland, we have got to come up with more energy options. We’ve got to come up with a more sustainable and affordable way for people to be able to harness energy. We have to do more to invest in our grid. We have to do more to make sure that we are not solely reliant on individual or independent sources of energy.”

Moore added he’s looking forward to working with the federal government “to figure out just where exactly they are, and what they will support and fund, because federal involvement does matter in these projects, we cannot deny that.”

During his 2024 campaign, Trump said he’d end offshore wind with an executive order “on Day 1.” Once he took office in January, the President continued to make overtures about stomping out offshore wind projects, calling them “an economic and environmental disaster” that only work with government subsidies.

Read the full article at OC Today-Dispatch

Offshore wind stalls as Trump’s hostility deepens

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.”

Read the full article at E&E News

Judge allows lawsuit challenging Trump’s wind energy ban to proceed

June 20, 2025 — A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s temporary ban on wind energy development throughout the United States can go forward, a federal court in Boston ruled Wednesday.

More than a dozen Democratic attorneys general sued over a Trump executive order suspending all federal wind energy approvals, citing the need for further review of their economic and environmental impact. U.S. District Judge William Young allowed the challenge to proceed against the Interior Department under the Administrative Procedure Act but dismissed several other claims based on different theories and involving other defendants.

Young said that his oral ruling from the bench was tentative and he reserved the right to alter his decision when he issues a written opinion.

Assuming Young’s oral ruling stands, both sides will submit motions for summary judgment that will be heard on September 4.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Federal judge to allow states’ offshore wind lawsuit to proceed

June 19, 2025 — A federal judge on Wednesday issued a tentative ruling, partially allowing and partially denying the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the multistate lawsuit against its freeze on offshore wind permitting and leasing — a consequential case for the industry and the coastal states relying on it to supply electricity amid growing grid demand in the coming decades.

Judge William G. Young ruled that the states have standing to bring this case, and that the permitting freeze – which has been given no deadline or timeline – is essentially a final agency decision (as opposed to an ongoing review) and as such, can be challenged by the states.

Still, he continues to express concern as to how a lifting of the freeze would consequently lead to government agencies issuing the outstanding permits to wind developers. (In the words of the federal government in its filing, “they would not” automatically issue.)

For example, SouthCoast Wind received final project approval, but it still needs three federal permits, which were previously set to issue in March, before construction can start.

The lawsuit will tentatively proceed to a motion for summary judgment in September, for which the federal government must submit administrative records to the court that document its decision to implement the wind order by July 2.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

Commercial fishers, conservation groups sue to block Empire Wind offshore energy development

June 16, 2025 –A coalition of commercial fishers, conservation groups, seafood processors, and a local mayor has filed an emergency motion seeking to block the development of Empire Wind, an offshore wind project planned off the coast of the U.S. state of New York.

In their suit, the groups claim that the wind energy operations will cause substantial harm to the commercial fishing sector while threatening endangered whales and damaging the seafloor.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Opponents seek injunction to halt Empire Wind

June 13, 2025 — Commercial fishermen and opponents of the Empire Wind project asked a federal court to immediately halt pile driving and construction activity, weeks after the Trump administration allowed construction to resume.

The coalition, which filed a lawsuit June 3 in U.S. District Court, returned to ask for a preliminary injunction June 12, according to the group Protect Our Coast New Jersey.

Energy company Equinor would build an array of 54 turbines on its 80,000-acre federal lease near the approaches to New York Harbor. The plan dates back to December 2016 when Equinor (then known as Statoil) first won a lease sale by the federal Bureau of Ocean energy Management.

Commercial fishing advocates have long opposed wind projects in the area, citing nearby fishing grounds like the Mud Hole and Cholera Bank with historic mixed trawl fisheries, and sea scallops, the Mid-Atlantic’s most valuable fishery.

Protect Our Coast New Jersey contends the renewed construction poses “imminent, irreversible harm to marine life, fishing grounds, the seafood supply chain, and coastal economies.”

Read the full article at WorkBoat