The Transportation Department on Friday said it was terminating or withdrawing $679 million in federal funding for 12 projects around the country intended to support the development of offshore wind power, the latest of the Trump administration’s escalating attacks against the wind industry.
The funds, approved by the Biden administration, include $427 million awarded last year to upgrade a marine terminal in Humboldt County, Calif. The new terminal would be used to assemble and launch wind turbines capable of floating in the ocean, which the state of California had been planning to deploy to meet its renewable energy goals.
The list of targeted projects also includes $48 million for an offshore wind port on Staten Island, $39 million to upgrade a port near Norfolk, Va. and $20 million for a marine terminal in Paulsboro, N.J. Most of the projects were intended to be staging areas for the construction of giant wind turbines that would eventually be placed at sea.
“Wasteful wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go toward revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. He said that, where possible, the funding would be redirected toward upgrading other ports.
Mr. Trump has been a vocal opponent of wind power for years, and on his first day in office he issued a moratorium on federal approvals for new offshore wind projects.
In recent weeks, his administration has sharply increased its attacks on the wind industry, going so far as to order the halt of construction at Revolution Wind, a $6.2 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was nearly finished. Officials in Rhode Island and Connecticut have assailed the move, saying there was no legal justification for blocking the order and that the move would threaten the reliability of the region’s electricity supply.
On Friday, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, said he had asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to block the Trump administration’s stop-work order.
“We’ve got billions of dollars in investment and a project on the finish line to deliver affordable, American-made, renewable energy right off the coast of Connecticut,” Mr. Tong said. “We’re notifying the court now that Trump’s irrational stop to Revolution Wind will jack up energy bills, hurt workers and weaken our grid.”
The Trump administration has also signaled in a court filing that it plans to rescind federal approval for yet another wind farm, the Maryland Offshore Wind Project. That facility had not yet begun construction but would consist of up to 114 wind turbines off the coast of Ocean City, Md.
One of the federal grants targeted for cancellation would have provided $47 million for a manufacturing hub in Baltimore County, Md., that was intended to help transport the large steel towers used in offshore wind farms.
The Interior Department is also requiring dozens of formerly routine consultations and approvals for wind and solar projects to undergo new layers of political review by the interior secretary’s office, a policy that is causing significant permitting delays. The agency is also opening investigations into the bird deaths caused by wind farms.
The Biden administration had sought to encourage the nascent offshore wind industry as part of its strategy to combat climate change, and in 2021 set a goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030, which would generate enough electricity to power roughly 10 million homes.
In the intervening years, many of those planned offshore wind projects foundered as a result of soaring costs, high interest rates, supply chain delays and bursts of local opposition. After Mr. Trump took office this year, more projects stalled amid the federal government’s hostility to wind power and tariff uncertainty, and some wind companies announced that they were pausing investments in the United States for the foreseeable future.
Only a handful of offshore wind projects in the U.S. are still currently under construction, including Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind off New York; Vineyard Wind near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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