David Pakman does a nice job dissecting Interior Secretary Burgum’s BS on offshore wind.
It’s all going to court, and odds are high that this nonsense will not stand. It does discourage capital from these investments, and that’s certainly one motivation for the continued interference.
Fun Fact:
Burgum’s state, North Dakota, where he used to be Governor, and knows very well, saw electricity prices fall as they added more wind and sun, and shut down coal plants over the last 6 years.
On Fox News, he bragged about lower electricity prices in his state, without telling the audience why, and admitting the very reason offshore wind is under attack, because it competes so well with natural gas, and completely obliterates coal.
US President Donald Trump hates wind power. His administration has made a concerted effort to thwart the industry. Trump issued a directive within hours of his return to the White House in January that froze new permitting for wind energy and ordered officials to consider terminating existing leases.
But his campaign — which cast a pall over the wind industry, triggering project delays and some cancellations — has run into legal problems. A federal judge ruled on Dec. 8 that Trump’s decree was illegal. Earlier, in September, a different federal judge suspended an order the administration had issued to stop work on Revolution Wind — a large, nearly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.
Trump’s directive, issued in the form of a memorandum to high-level administration officials, effectively froze offshore wind development. It stipulated that no new wind projects would be authorized in ocean areas controlled by federal rather than state authorities, which is where most major offshore wind farms are located. In addition, the edict suspended the issuance of new or renewed federal authorizations for all wind farms. Projects on federal lands or waters require such approvals, as do other projects whose transmission lines cross a federal waterway or public land.
His decree also directed the Interior Department to review the “necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and to identify “any legal bases for such removal.” Accordingly, the administration in August ordered work halted on the Revolution Wind project when it was 80% completed.
Wind companies and local government officials have warned that the administration’s actions against the industry put jobs and billions of dollars in investments at risk.
What have the courts said?
Ruling on a legal challenge to Trump’s directive brought by more than a dozen US states and a clean energy group, US District Judge Patti Saris threw out the order entirely. She said the edict was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
In a separate lawsuit, the developers of the Revolution Wind project, Orsted A/S and Global Infrastructure Partners, made the same argument in challenging the administration’s stop-work order. After concluding that they were likely to win the case, US District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction, enabling work on the project to continue pending the final outcome of the suit. Orsted Chief Executive Officer Rasmus Errboe has said the company expects to complete Revolution Wind by the second half of 2026.
Wind industry advocates have hailed Saris’ December decision as a victory. Marguerite Wells, executive director of Alliance for Clean Energy New York, said it will allow projects to be judged on their merits.
However, analysts with ClearView Energy Partners, an energy policy research firm, argue that the win could prove to be merely symbolic. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling, which could extend the legal uncertainty for at least another year. In addition, Trump’s opposition to offshore wind farms especially has already dampened the interest of project investors and developers, and the cloud could last beyond Trump’s presidency, according to ClearView.
There’s nothing in the judge’s ruling compelling the administration to issue new leases or approvals for wind projects. Agencies can still reject permit applications or slow-walk reviews, ClearView said. There’s a precedent for this from the Biden presidency. A federal court suspended a policy of the Biden administration to stop issuing companies licenses to export natural gas to countries without free-trade agreements with the US. Even so, the moratorium continued informally.
But why let reality intrude on a perfectly good ideology?–if Trump’s impulses are coherent enough to call an ideology. Okay, so it’s just a simple and stupid prejudice. Still, they put up wind turbines in the townships just south of us, and now I have precancerous skin lesions and we’ve had milk go bad.