Striking another blow against clean energy, the Trump administration stopped work at an offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was nearing completion. He also canceled the contracts for a wind farm 10 miles off the coast of Maryland, where construction had not started.
Trump hates wind farms, possibly because he received large campaign contributions from the oil and gas and coal industries.
But his rage towards wind farms goes back almost 20 years.
Fortune Magazine wrote that Trump has railed against wind energy since 2006, when he saw that the Scottish government was building a wind farm near his new golf club. From that time forward, he opposed wind energy.
Trump wrote in a 2013 Daily Mail article that he would fight “for as long as it takes—to hell if I have to—and spend as much as it takes to block this useless and grotesque blot on our heritage.” By the time he was first running for president in 2015, Trump had tweeted negatively about wind or “windmills” more than 130 times.
Much to Trump’s chagrin, the Scottish wind farm opened in 2018. But he’s carried that fight much more aggressively in his second term as U.S. president.
Upon his return to Scotland this July, he emphasized: “We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us”. Trump added Aug. 20 on Truth Social that he “will not approve” wind or solar projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he posted.
The Trump administration has ordered companies to stop construction of a wind farm that’s being built off the coast of Rhode Island.
The acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Matthew Giacona, wrote in a letter to one of the developers, a Danish firm called Ørsted, that the government was halting work on the almost-finished project in order to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.” The project is also being developed by Global Infrastructure Partners.
The order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project is the latest move by the Trump administration targeting the country’s renewable energy industry. President Trump, a longtime critic of the wind industry, in January issued a moratorium on new development of offshore wind projects. The Internal Revenue Service recently put out new guidance that makes it harder for companies building wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax incentives. And the Commerce Department is investigatingwhether imports of wind turbines and their components threaten national security.
The Trump administration is working to halt development of an offshore wind project planned near Maryland, in the latest escalation of the White House’s war on theclean energy source loathed by the president.
The Interior Department plans to move to remand and vacate a permit granted to the $6 billion Maryland Offshore Wind Project, according to a court filing dated Friday. The project, which will consist of as many as 114 wind turbines about 10 nautical miles off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland, was approved by the Biden administration in 2024 and was set to begin construction next year.