Trump pledged “no new windmills.” Recent orders and policy changes aim to make that a reality.
By Kiley Price for Inside Climate News
In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, President Donald Trump made a pledge: “no new windmills.” He’s made major headway on that this year.
Since January, the administration has issued a flurry of orders and actions disrupting wind development on the country’s federal lands and waters, which has had ripple effects across the industry. The latest in this series of moves comes from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who ordered a sprawling review of all wind projects across the U.S., including some that were already approved.
Burgum is also leading a charge in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to investigate bald eagle deaths that may be related to wind farms, invoking a law that the Trump administration has simultaneously sought to undermine due to the restrictions it puts on oil and gas producers. Though some politicians from both sides of the aisle are pushing back, this all-around assault on wind is having ripple effects across the industry.
A Wind Shakedown
Over the last decade, wind capacity in the country has more than doubled, generating about 425,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 alone, according to a report by the nonprofit Climate Central. That’s enough to power more than 39 million average American homes.
Some of the top wind producers are red states, including Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma, which received tax incentives under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to rapidly grow their operations.
Now, the Trump administration has taken the wind out of the industry’s sails (or in this case, turbines). The first day Trump entered office, he issued an order halting approval of leases, permits and loans for offshore and onshore wind energy pending a federal review.
“We aren’t going to do the wind thing,” Trump said before signing the order.
The administration in April halted the construction of a New York offshore wind project. Still, it later reversed the pause after White House talks with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who stressed the importance of the operation, according to a statement. In recent weeks, though, the Trump administration has more aggressively doubled down on its anti-wind approach. At the end of July, the Department of Transportation issued a recommendation that wind farms be placed at least 1.2 miles away from federal highways and railroads, and directed the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate” proposed turbines’ potential impacts on air traffic. The FAA already has a review process during the siting phase of a project to help prevent a radar interference issue “long before a wind plant is built,” according to the Department of Energy’s website.
On Aug. 1, Burgum issued a secretarial order for more “reliable” energy development—alluding to fossil fuels—over “environmentally damaging wind and solar” development on federal lands. This “could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property,” Jael Holzman reports for Heatmap.
The agency is now requiring more lengthy and high-level reviews by the interior secretary for wind energy projects on public lands or private lands that need federal approval, causing permitting delays. On Aug. 6, the Interior Department canceled the Lava Ridge Wind Project, a 1,000-megawatt wind facility in southern Idaho that received approval from the Biden administration.
Burgum also recently directed the Fish and Wildlife Service to review potential wind farm violations of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, a law that prohibits anyone from killing, hurting or causing other harm to eagles unless they have a permit. An infraction could lead to fines, criminal charges or prison.
“Wind projects are known to kill eagles, and climate extremists in the Biden admin still greenlit scores of these projects,” Burgum wrote on X on Aug. 4. The Interior Department is “enforcing the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act to ensure that our national bird is not sacrificed for unreliable wind facilities!”
The move mimics past strategies to condemn offshore wind for its potential impact on wildlife such as whales, though biologists say there is no evidence that turbines drive mass cetacean mortalities.
Oil pits have historically killed more than triple the number of birds each year than land-based wind farms. Yet the administration has not announced a similar investigation of the oil industry.
The Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment on its recent actions related to wind, and how they could affect jobs and investments in the industry.
Ripple Effects
The hits against wind are also coming from Congress, as evidenced by the passage of the recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act that reduced or eliminated many of the tax incentives offered to renewable energy projects. Experts say these cuts go against the Trump administration’s proclaimed mission of “energy dominance,” my colleague Aidan Hughes reported in July.
“America needs affordable, reliable and domestically produced energy,” Lucero Marquez, associate director for federal climate policy at the Center for American Progress, told Inside Climate News. “Gutting clean energy incentives really just does not help meet those goals.”
The wind industry is feeling the sting of all these actions.
On Monday, shares of the world’s biggest offshore wind developer plummeted by a third after Ørsted announced its goal to raise $9.4 billion to supplement losses related to Trump-era wind cuts. The Danish company is in the midst of a widespread wind expansion along the U.S. East Coast. Changes to these projects and other wind power construction could impact the employees and contractors working on them, including a group of fishermen known as Sea Services North America, who bucked tradition by working for offshore wind farms, Canary Media reports.
Related | Trump issues executive order targeting ‘unreliable’ clean energy options
Meanwhile, officials from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources have delayed the fifth round of offshore wind procurement until at least next year due to industry uncertainty amid all these changes, Renews reports.
Last week, four congressional Democrats—including Martin Heinrich, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—sent a letter condemning the recent secretarial orders.
“Rather than ensuring an efficient permitting process for all energy resources, it appears this directive actively disfavors renewable projects in favor of more expensive, and more polluting, technologies,” the politicians wrote.
A few Republicans whose constituents have benefited from wind and solar-related jobs also pushed back against the administration’s aggressive anti-renewable push, Politico reports.
Related | Noted windbag is freaking out about windmills—again
But even if changes are reversed, experts say this swift and comprehensive attack on wind could have major long-term consequences for the burgeoning industry.
“We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told Heatmap. “It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
More Top Climate News
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“This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to bust our union,” Nicole Cantello, an EPA worker who serves as president of that agency’s union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, told The Post. “And just like before, we’ll fight them at every step.”
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“These are substantial impacts and evidence that the increasing frequency of coral bleaching is really starting to have detrimental effects on the Great Barrier Reef,” Mike Emslie, who heads the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s long-term monitoring program, told the AP. “While there’s still a lot of coral cover out there, these are record declines that we have seen in any one year of monitoring.”
