On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum entitled “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects.” As its name suggests, the memorandum withdraws future areas from offshore wind leasing and initiates a review of the federal government’s permitting practices for wind projects. In addition, the memorandum placed a temporary pause on federal permitting approvals for offshore wind projects. On the east coast, this memorandum has had an immediate negative impact on the offshore wind industry as projects that had spent years conducting site investigations and designing construction and operations plans and were nearly ready for their final permits and approvals were paused at the last moment. Conversely, the west coast offshore wind projects have been less impacted by the memorandum. The reason is that these projects are still in the very early stages. RWE and Vineyard Offshore, the two companies who purchased leases in the Humboldt Wind Energy Area, were not planning to ask the federal government for permit approvals for several years because they needed more time to conduct site investigations and design their projects. For more information on the memorandum and its potential impacts on the proposed Humboldt offshore wind projects be sure to check out the new article on northcoastoffshorewind.org.
Let’s step back for a second and ask ourselves a basic question. Why is President Trump obsessed with harming the offshore wind industry? Well, according to him, it’s because he cares about nature. On inauguration day during a speech to supporters, Trump went out of his way to talk about wind turbines driving whales crazy. It’s important to note here that according to actual whale biologists wind turbines are not a significant threat to whales and that there has never been a documented case of an offshore wind farm harming a whale. Despite this, Trump has argued that the environmental permitting process for offshore wind has been too lenient in the past. This is strange given the long permitting timeline for offshore wind projects. For example, Vineyard Wind 1 executed its lease in 2015 and installed its first turbine in 2023. Meanwhile, Trump is simultaneously issuing executive orders to speed up environmental permitting for fossil fuel projects like oil and natural gas. Another Trump talking point is that wind energy is more expensive than natural gas. Trump, a climate change denier, sees natural gas as his preferred energy source despite its negative impacts on the climate and air quality. Trump’s ire is so acute that he recently called on the United Kingdom to get rid of its offshore wind turbines and replace them with offshore oil wells.
That recent news story reminded me of the first time I’d ever heard about a connection between Trump and offshore wind. Trump owns a hotel and golf course in Scotland that looks over Aberdeen Bay. When the Scottish government proposed the construction of a demonstration offshore wind farm near the Trump golf course, Trump filed an objection. Unlike the wind farms proposed off the coast of Humboldt which are 20 miles offshore at their closest point, this wind farm was proposed to be just 3 kilometres (1.864 miles) offshore, making the turbines far more visible. Trump was worried that the visible site of wind turbines would detract from the experience of his golf course and opposed the project. Years of litigation ensued but Trump lost his final appeal in 2015. The wind farm began generating power in 2018 and has been a great success, annually displacing over 134,000 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of removing approximately 35,000 cars from UK roads.
Clearly Trump has a personal vendetta against offshore wind turbines but does that explain the whole story? Another potential incentive comes from Trump’s friends in the oil and gas industries. During the election, Trump asked oil and gas companies for $1billion. What did they get in exchange? In addition to tax benefits and easier permitting for their projects, I would argue that Trump is purposely sabotaging one of the fossil fuel industry’s main competitors, the offshore wind industry. I’ve written elsewhere about how offshore wind helps to achieve a zero emission electricity grid by generating carbon free electricity at times of the day when solar power isn’t available. Historically we have used natural gas to fill those gaps but the introduction of offshore wind as well as batteries on to our electric grid is bringing us closer to a future where we no longer have to rely on fossil fuel power plants at all. In addition, the additional electricity that offshore wind turbines would generate can reduce the costs of electricity, making electric cars more competitive with internal combustion engines that run on fossil fuels. Because of this, fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars spreading disinformation about offshore wind designed to scare the public about this renewable energy resource. A report at Brown University documented how fossil fuel interests are working with climate denial think tanks and community groups to obstruct offshore wind projects. This support included a playbook of talking points about whales and the high cost of offshore wind, both of which have been repeated by President Trump. If your goal is to spread disinformation about an industry what more could you ask for than the President of the United States spreading it himself.
Environmental nonprofits like the Sierra Club, Audubon, NRDC, SLO Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, Environment California, Nature Conservancy, and others believe that offshore wind is an important part of our nation’s green energy future. Decarbonizing our electric grid is essential for stopping climate change and fighting air pollution. Don’t fall for Donald Trump or the fossil fuel industry’s lies about offshore wind.