President-elect Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order to ban or restrict new offshore wind farms — a potential blow to states such as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts that are depending on the clean energy to help meet what critics call pie-in-the-sky goals.
New Jersey Congressman Jefferson Van Drew, who represents the Garden State’s beach communities, said he’s working closely with Trump on drafting the new executive order
“These offshore wind projects should have never been approved in the first place,” said Van Drew, a Republican.
“The Biden administration’s reckless green agenda put politics over people, and that ends now. President Trump is committed to stopping these harmful projects and is taking decisive action.
He said the executive order is “just the beginning” and vowed to “fight tooth and nail” to prevent offshore wind farms from “wreaking havoc” on coastal communities.
Trump’s opposition to wind farms had an immediate impact after he was elected in November.
A French energy giant, TotalEnergies SE, announced that it had halted a plan to build an offshore wind farm near the New York-New Jersey coastline after Trump’s victory.
The US federal government has ramped up spending in recent years to incentivize wind energy and move away from fossil fuel.
From 2016 to 2022, the federal government spent $18.7 billion on tax credits and other subsidies for wind power, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian or “free market” think tank.
“This is a massive amount of money. It’s even more considerable given that wind’s intermittency heavily limits its benefit to reliability,” the group said.
There are three operating or planned windmill farms off the coast of Long Island: South Fork, 35 miles east of Montauk; Sunrise, which is under construction, and Empire Wind 1.
“It’s going to cost the state tens of billions of dollars to meet its climate goals” if they are enforced, said Ken Girardin, research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy.
He said much of the costs will be passed off to ratepayers in their electricity bills — not just for wind and solar power but also battery storage plants.
Last year, Hochul and the NYS Energy Research Development Authority announced the average increase in residential customers’ bill for Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects would be about 2%, or about $2.09 per month.
A source close to the wind farm industry accused critics of scare-mongering, noting that the fossil fuel firms also get generous tax subsidies.
An analysis by New York Focus last year found that state agencies granted more than $1.1 billion in tax breaks to fossil fuel projects from 2010 to 2022, averaging close to $85 million per year.
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