Offshore Wind Reprieve? Trump Allows Restart Of $5 Billion Project

Forbes

20-05-2025

Supply ship visits wind farm near Norfolk, U.K.
PA Images via Getty Images
Like a 180-degree shift in the winds, the Department of Interior on Monday reversed its order from April for Norwegian energy giant Equinor to halt work on the $5 billion Empire Wind project. The venture – which will feature dozens of turbines dotting 80,000 acres of Atlantic Ocean 15 miles southeast off Long Island, New York – had been in limbo for weeks, and was costing Equinor $50 million a week to keep 10 ships floating on site. Now they can get back to work. In a statement Monday Equinor CEO Anders Opedal thanked New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for 'constructive collaboration' with the Trump administration over the issue.
The halt work order from the Dept. of Interior followed on a January 20 directive from President Donald Trump ending all offshore wind leasing and permitting pending an investigation into 'deficiencies' in the Biden Administration's practices, 'the consequences of which may lead to grave harm' to marine navigation, national security, and 'marine mammals.'
It was hard for Equinor to believe. They had painstakingly navigated federal and New York state regulations since leasing the tract in 2017. And so far work has been 30% completed, with foundations set in the seafloor for turbines so massive that the tips of their blades will slice the skies 900 feet above the waves (nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building), and harvest ocean breezes to generate 800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 500,000 New York City homes. Gearing up for Empire Wind, Equinor created 1,500 jobs and invested $900 million in rebuilding the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal to serve as a staging area for offshore work.
After the halt to Empire Wind, Gov. Kathy Hochul had said she would 'not allow this federal overreach to stand.' New York is among 17 states that have sued over Trump's Jan. 20 memo, lambasting the need for 'an amorphous, redundant, extra-statutory, and multi-agency review of unknown duration.' It's unclear what concessions, if any, the president extracted from Hochul. Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to see the resurrection of the defunct Constitution gas pipeline project that would carry natural gas from Pennsylvania to western New York.
It's an odd change of heart from the Administration. In April Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum promised that no wind permitting would resume until 'further reviews' and that his office had discovered an unpublished Biden-era report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that he said detailed offshore wind's harmful effects on whales, fisheries, and shipping. On May 4 Burgum tweeted that tax dollars would "no longer be wasted on intermittent and costly Green New Deal wind projects."
Last week Senator Chuck Schumer complained that Interior refused to share copies of the secret NOAA report. Schumer, in a speech, lambasted Trump for wanting to even the score after waging an ultimately unsuccessful battle to prevent erection of 11 offshore turbines visible from his Trump International golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. 'He fought to kill it, he lost,' said Schumer. 'So now he's taking it out on all offshore wind to the detriment of American energy needs.'
Equinor's Opedal also thanked Schumer for his support.
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But you can't just blame Trump for the pending demise of offshore wind in America. Long before his reelection, the industry was having no problem falling apart on its own.
In 2023 Avangrid canceled its 800 mw Park City project offshore Connecticut. It was supposed to provide 14% of the state's power, but became 'unfinanceable' at higher interest rates.
Also in 2023 Orsted canceled its 2,400 megawatt Ocean Wind I & II project offshore New Jersey. And in 2024 Orsted also withdrew from developing the 966 mw Skipjack I & II off Maryland. Orsted in January 2025 took $1.7 billion of charges against earnings due to the impairment of its Sunrise wind off New York's Montauk.
Portugal's EDP Renewables and France's Engie have put on hold a Massachusetts project called South Coast Wind. Also halted, the Icebreaker project planned for Lake Erie.
Surfers in Rhode Island watch waves pass Block Island Wind, America's first offshore wind farm, built 2016.
Boston Globe via Getty Images
Oil giants BP and Shell have also backed away from wind. BP wrote down the value of all its U.S. offshore wind ventures and hived them off into a JV with Japan's Jera. Shell in March exited its Atlantic Shores offshore project with EDF Renewables and took a $1 billion charge after Trump's Environmental Protection Agency withdrew the venture's air permits. Trump had earlier said he wanted to see Atlantic Shores 'dead and gone.'
Even Equinor in early 2024 canceled its Empire Wind 2 expansion plan, citing 'inflation, interest rates and supply chain disruptions.'
But the most dramatic illustration of the state of offshore wind in America had to be the disintegration last July of a 350-foot-long blade on a G.E. Halide X turbine at the Vineyard Wind project. For days, pieces of the fiberglass blade fell into the Atlantic then washed up as sharp chunks on the beaches of Nantucket. In response, G.E. Vernova reexamined 8,300 ultrasound images per blade and physically inspected them with 'crawler' drones, before deciding in late 2024 to remove some faulty blades already installed and strengthen others.
G.E. Vernova subsequently delayed the commercialization of its even bigger 18 mw Halide wind turbines, to the consternation of developers planning to deploy them, like billionaire Michael Polsky's Invenergy, which now has no turbines for its planned 2,400 mw Leading Light project off New Jersey. In 2024 G.E. Vernova's wind turbine business lost nealy $600mm on $10 billion revenues.
It's ironic, notes analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith at Jefferies, that the outlook for offshore wind is deteriorating despite a giant projected increase in U.S. electricity demand. That's because those new sources of demand – from gigascale artificial intelligence data centers – require 24/7 reliable power, which intermittent wind can't deliver.
They also want more power cheap and fast – of which offshore wind is neither. According to analysts, Orsted and Eversource are looking to raise $8.5 billion for its Sunrise project, which would price it at $9,200 per kilowatt and $150 per megawatt-hour. Perhaps the most expensive non-nuclear power project in history.
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So beyond the anti-green political posturing, could the Trump administration really have legitimate reasons to bring to a full stop an industry already on life support? A report from the Government Accountability Office, commissioned by Congress and released April 14, is not encouraging. Authored by 23 experts who consulted 22 tribal groups, among other stakeholders, the GAO report details numerous gaps in oversight leading up to the wave of wind farm approvals.
Lingering concerns include: turbine blade interference with radar systems for defense and maritime navigation; injury to marine creatures from noisy seafloor pile driving; blocked access to commercial and recreational fishing; and the ongoing deaths of countless birds and bats.
The report further criticized the Biden Interior department for insufficient consultation with tribal stakeholders. It says several tribal groups never heard back from Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management explaining the reasoning behind why 'tribal suggestions were not incorporated or that consensus could not be attained.' Tribes are bothered by changes to the uninterrupted horizon and blinking red lights on the turbines that 'may disrupt traditional prayer and dance ceremonies.'
Also mentioned by the GAO are the 500 scallopers and fisherman of the port of New Bedford, Mass., who bring in the most highly valued catch in the country, valued at $380 million, and whose gear is at risk of entanglement with newly installed subsea infrastructure and transmission cables.
To be sure, the offshore wind ramp-up brought big investment to New England's ports, with Massachusetts funding 7 redevelopment projects for $180 million including $45 million for New Bedford. Meanwhile, an 11-state Fisheries Mitigation Project is still trying to figure out how to establish a process by which the wind developers will compensate fishermen for messing up their industry.
And there's not yet any absolution on the issue of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, a couple dozen of which have died in recent years, out of some 370 remaining. While fisheries scientists from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have said in published reports that they do not anticipate any death or serious injury of whales from offshore wind activity, other independent researchers believe that pile driving, acoustic seafloor testing and added ship traffic are endangering the whales. Dominion Energy is in litigation with environmental groups alleging that permits for its 176-turbine Commercial Virginia Offshore Wind project 25 miles off Virginia Beach ought to be revoked to save the whales.
Whale lovers can hope that Congress, in its final version of the ongoing budget reconciliation bill, might deter future investment in offshore wind by rolling back and sunsetting federal green energy subsidies like those enshrined in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that enable developers to take tax credits of up to 40% of the cost of building projects. For example, under existing law, when and if they finish the accident-plagued $4 billion Vineyard Wind project developers Avangrid and Copenhagen Investment could get back $1.6 billion in tax credits. According to analysis from consultancy WoodMackenzie, the credits would stay at full value for projects completed by 2028, then phase out entirely by 2032.
The Netherlands this year made its first attempt to conduct an offshore wind lease under a new zero-subsidy model. No developers were interested.