As Offshore Wind War Heats Up, Trump’s Flop Sweat Is Showing

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On December 22, President Donald Trump finally ordered a halt to construction activity at the 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. What took you so long, Donald? Trump has been threatening the US offshore wind industry with total destruction ever since January, one notable exception being the Virginia project. Somehow, CVOW was shielded by someone, or something — up until now, that is. Gosh, who or what could that be?

Somebody Really, Really Does Not Like Offshore Wind Turbines

For those of you new to the topic, the President’s personal vendetta against wind turbines in general and offshore wind turbines in particular can be traced to an old lawsuit over a wind farm in Scotland, as widely reported around the media world and here at CleanTechnica. 

For whatever reasons, though, during the president’s first term in office, his bête noire did not carry over into federal policy with much force. The offshore wind industry depends on leases issued by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in the US Department of the Interior, but nobody remembered to tell BOEM to stop issuing leases. So, BOEM kept preparing new lease auctions between 2017 and 2021, enabling more wind projects to keep moving through the pipeline.

As a result, by the time former President Joe Biden left office on January 20 of this year, the offshore wind industry had a stack of federal leases in hand, and construction activity was well underway at offshore sites in New England as well as New York and Virginia. Additional projects in New Jersey and elsewhere were also fully permitted and approaching the construction phase.

That came to an abrupt halt when Trump took office again. This time around, he was well prepared to exert his lease authority against the offshore wind industry. Not coincidentally, offshore wind is also a ripe target for partisan attacks. With the exception of Virginia, the states hosting offshore wind projects are the ones in which the Democratic Party holds the governor’s office (see lots more offshore background here).

And, that’s where things get interesting. While wind industry stakeholders in Democratic states have battled the Trump administration in court to keep projects moving this year (or made side deals with the White House), the CVOW project seemed immune from the Trump chopper.

Perhaps — and this is just wild conjecture — the Republican Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, personally interceded on behalf of CVOW. Despite having the endorsement of Trump when running for office, Youngkin has consistently supported the project.

Opposing Trump on offshore wind requires some courage — or not, as the case may be. Youngkin was already term-limited by the time CVOW got underway. With 2025 being his last year in office, the governor didn’t need much courage to cross Trump on the issue of wind turbines. And, for reasons best known only to himself, Trump spared Youngkin the political embarrassment of an untimely end to one of his signature projects.

So, what happened? Why did Trump finally issue a stop-work order against CVOW now? Election Day 2025 happened, of course. That’s what happened. Virginia was one of two states to hold an off-year gubernatorial election on November 4. The Republican candidate for governor lost and the Democratic candidate, Abigail Spanberger, will be sworn into office on January 17, thereby putting Virginia into the same sinking offshore wind boat as every other Democratic state on the Atlantic Coast.

New Offshore Wind Order Shows Flop Sweat, Not Strength

In addition to CVOW, the new stop-work order impacts four other projects: Vineyard Wind (Massachusetts), Revolution Wind (Rhode Island and Connecticut), Sunrise Wind (New York), and Empire Wind (also New York). The Trump administration cited national security risks as the justification for the order, which is awfully strange considering that all five projects already underwent a thorough, multi-agency national security review as a condition for approval.

Presumably, a brand new national security risk has suddenly surfaced, something so extreme, dire, and dangerous that it justifies interrupting five major infrastructure projects in midstream, upending state energy plans and impacting thousands of workers, businesses, and investors. Well, no. In a brief press release issuing the stop-work order, the Interior Department described a mashup of unspecified new information with old, unclassified concerns about radar interference that have long been settled.

In addition, the stop-work order doesn’t come right out and say that any of the five projects are officially dead in the water. “This pause will give the Department [of the Interior], along with the Department of War [actually, of Defense] and other relevant government agencies, time to work with leaseholders and state partners to assess the possibility of mitigating the national security risks posed by these projects,” the Interior Department explained.

No word yet on why construction can’t continue while the assessment is underway, unless there is truly a deep, concerning, immanent national security emergency that will burst upon the US at any minute. In fact, the only emergency in sight is the president’s desperation to win a battle, any battle, even if it’s just tilting at windmills.

For all his bluster, Trump failed to stop the US wind industry this year, whether offshore or onshore.

For that matter, Trump is failing at, well, everything. His approval rating is tanking alongside the state of the US economy. The flop sweat is practically bursting through his stage makeup as he careens from one public relations disaster to another, hoping against hope to distract public attention away from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Nevertheless, the Epstein scandal refuses to go away, proving once again that the coverup is worse than the crime. Even Trump’s rock-hard MAGA conspiracy cult is beginning to crumble over the Epstein coverup. After all, the existence of a child sex ring run by shadowy elites has been a go-to for MAGA since the heyday of Q-Anon and Pizzagate. MAGA voters ferried Trump back into office on the promise that all would finally be revealed in the Epstein files, and all they got was some lousy T-shirts.

As for wind power, it’s back to court for the US states that have been banking on offshore wind to keep the kilowatts flowing. Equinor has also affirmed that it intends to see Empire Wind through to completion. After all, the wind will continue to blow long after Trump leaves office for the second and final time as scheduled on January 20, 2029 — peacefully this time, one hopes.

Photo: Say it ain’t so! Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is one of five offshore wind projects on the Atlantic coast “paused” by the Trump administration on December 22 (cropped, courtesy of CVOW).