President Donald Trump has never been a fan of wind farms, delivering a “haymaker” to the clean energy industry this week by ordering a pause on the construction of five East Coast offshore projects slated to power nearly 2.7 million homes. He thinks wind farms are “ugly” and has frequently invoked potential harms to wildlife, said The New York Times. And administration officials argue that the five wind farms are “national security risks” but offer little evidence.
Trump remains “apoplectic” about his failure to stop construction of one off the coast of his Scottish golf course. Wind farms are “driving the whales crazy, obviously,” he said in January.
The president’s decision marks an “escalation of a yearlong effort to shut down the industry,” said Politico. Electricity customers may soon feel the effects. A New England grid operator warned that Trump’s move “could send power prices soaring,” while a Virginia utility said the pause hurts its ability to “keep up with rising electricity consumption from data centers.” American voters are angry about affordability issues, and Trump’s decision “is running contrary to that in my opinion,” said Tim Ennis, a power market analyst at GridStatus.
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The wind pause is a “blow to America’s energy future,” The Washington Post said in an editorial. Halting the projects will particularly “set back the cause of generating enough energy to meet the demands of the AI boom.” The White House cited national security concerns, suggesting wind turbine blades “could interfere with radar,” but those worries “were not significant obstacles during the permitting process.” The permitting process must be reformed to make it more difficult to block “projects the economy desperately needs.”
Trump is making Americans pay more for electricity “because he is angry at windmills,” Dean Baker said in his newsletter. It is true that, as Trump often says, windmills kill birds, which is the “case with any structure.” But “wind energy is cheap” and costs less to produce than coal — about the same as natural gas — all while avoiding greenhouse gases. All this comes while China is building as much wind and solar capacity “as the rest of the world combined.” Americans “will pay a high price for Donald Trump’s irrational hatred of wind energy.”
What next?
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul warned that Trump’s decision will make it difficult for her state to “reduce emissions” while also “fending off grid reliability concerns and spiking utility rates,” said Spectrum News. She was part of a larger group of Democratic governors from northeast states who plotted a “strategy” to save the wind farms from the president’s authority, said The New York Times.
A federal lawsuit challenging the decision is likely, but negotiations with the White House are also possible. The governors, said Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, will be “exercising our rights and doing everything we can to keep these projects going.”
