The Interior Department’s Monday announcement that it halted all leases for offshore wind projects under construction, due to bogus “national security risks,” is the Trump administration’s biggest broadside yet against the wind industry and will set back the cause of generating enough energy to meet the demands of the AI boom.
The decision injects a fresh dose of turmoil into five projects along the Eastern Seaboard, which together are projected to power more than 2.5 million homes. A few already fended off earlier attempts to stop construction, but this is the first time the administration has tried to block the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, owned by Dominion Energy.
President Donald Trump has made no secret of his dislike for wind power over the years. A go-to riff in his stump speech has been about how windmills kill birds. Yet the Interior Department insists the latest pause is based on dangers identified by the Pentagon in “recently completed classified reports,” while noting that unclassified reports have said turbine blades could interfere with radar.
Such concerns were not significant obstacles during the permitting process, and Virginia’s Democratic senators say they’ve received no new information that would bolster such a claim. That’s notable since Sen. Mark Warner is the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Tim Kaine is the ranking member of the Armed Services’ seapower subcommittee.
Beyond the construction that has been stopped, at least for now, this is a blow to important efforts on Capitol Hill. Momentum has been building to address one the most stubborn problems in the U.S. economy: the federal web of bureaucracy that has long ensnared American infrastructure projects. A truly technology neutral permitting reform bill — that is, one which treats traditional carbon-based energy the same as renewable sources — might be able to pass the Senate, thereby unleashing the electricity needed to bring down energy costs.
But the timing of the Interior Department’s announcement sends an ominous political message. Last week, the House passed the SPEED Act mostly along party lines. In its original form, the bill boasted substantial support from both parties. A last-minute amendment from Republicans to codify the administration’s actions over the past year to block energy projects it doesn’t like prompted several Democrats to pull their support. That tweak already made the package dead on arrival in the Senate, because of the filibuster, without serious re-negotiation. The administration’s latest interference in wind projects makes its chances of revival slimmer.
Yet the reforms in the SPEED Act are exactly what’s needed to free the federal permitting process from lawyers who routinely abuse the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 to throw sand in the gears of progress. The bill that passed the House, for example, would exempt certain projects from reviews; limit environmental assessments so that they focus only on a project’s direct impacts; and limit the ability of opponents to sue.
Those changes would make it faster and less costly for new projects to break ground and connect to the grid. Most importantly, it would facilitate competition between different technologies in the energy market.
Too often, politicians promise an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum once did, only to backtrack once in office to boost their preferred industries, in this case oil and natural gas. The Trump administration has displayed an extreme version of this tendency to pick winners and losers, but it is by no means the first to do so. President Joe Biden tried to tip the scales toward green energy varieties he favored.
This only underscores the need to reform the federal permitting process and eliminate the ways in which energy activists — including those in the Oval Office — can veto projects the economy desperately needs.
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