By Jack Dini ——Bio and Archives--June 29, 2025

Cover Story | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

The wind industry faces political challenges. On January 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order halting approvals, permits and loans for new wind energy projects on federal lands or waters. The administration justified this by citing wind energy’s supposed unreliability and potential harm to wildlife.

This executive order raises concerns about long-term investment in wind. Developers may hesitate to invest due to high political risk.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a comprehensive review of the Department of the Interior’s offshore wind energy program. The report provides a postmortem of sorts on a policy agenda that, until recently, was speeding ahead under the Biden administration with the vigor of a runaway freight train. Under President Trump’s 2025 executive order, the brakes have been applied. No new leasing. No new permits. A full federal review is underway. (1)

The US Energy Department recently suspended a large grant at the University of Maine for research on floating wind technology. (2)

Maine averages just a mere 1,500 MW of electricity consumption, but they want to have a crazy 3,000 MW of offshore wind. This target assumes complete electrification of cars, trucks, home heat, etc.—the full transition, which is never going to happen.

Even worse, given the great offshore depths, this has to be floating wind which costs around three times as much as fixed bottom wind, which is already way too expensive. Floating wind is also environmentally destructive with a vast undersea web of anchoring cables.

Atlantic Shores South offshore wind farm was voided, just weeks after President Trump publicly hoped the project was ‘dead and gone.’ He got his wish. (3)

Atlantic Shores was supposed to deliver 2.8 gigawatts of electricity via 200 turbines, about 8.7 miles off the Jersey coast. But the public never bought the green utopia they were selling. Instead, people asked uncomfortable questions. Like: why are we installing massive metal structures in marine ecosystems to fix a problem that hasn’t been properly measured, modeled, or proven? The climate-industrial complex is finally facing a breeze it can’t spin.

The Trump administration is halting construction of a massive offshore wind project being built........

© Canada Free Press