Few politicians claim more credit for the dismantling of the offshore wind industry in the Northeast than Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey.
So the unseating of Mr. Van Drew in the recent midterm elections gave new hope to some advocates of renewable energy for the revival of massive wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean that had been scuttled by the Trump administration before they could be built.
The question now is whether the ambitious plans that New Jersey, New York and other states had for developing fields of giant turbines to turn coastal winds into electricity will ever be resurrected.
For proponents of renewable energy, the narrow victory for Mr. Van Drew’s Democratic opponent, Zack Mullock, was a “pleasant surprise,” said Anjuli Ramos-Busot, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. Mr. Van Drew was not solely responsible for short-circuiting the offshore wind industry’s progress, but “he had a lot to do with it,” she said.
Mr. Van Drew, a Democrat turned Republican who morphed into one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, claimed that he had been instrumental in drafting a sweeping executive order signed by Mr. Trump on the first day of his second term that halted all permitting of wind projects in federal waters.
Mr. Van Drew said this week that he intended to continue to oppose offshore wind “in any way I can,” while he contemplates running again in 2028. “They’re very, very expensive” and “bad for the environment,” he said.
In the meantime, Mr. Van Drew said he was confident that Mr. Trump would not relax his ban on any new offshore wind development. “He’s made it clear that he’s not going to allow that,” Mr. Van Drew said.
Last month, in a debate, Mr. Mullock said he was supportive of solar power and renewable energy in general. But he said he had concerns about the effects of offshore wind farms on commercial fishing, a substantial business around Cape May, the southern New Jersey city where he is the mayor.
“We should do wind where it is appropriate, where it doesn’t hurt our environment and our commercial fishing industry,” Mr. Mullock said.
Ms. Ramos-Busot said she hoped the election outcome would give momentum to Democrats in the state “to get serious about clean energy.” But she and other environmental advocates admitted that in New Jersey in particular, the offshore wind industry is nearly dead in the water.
The state’s former governor, Phil Murphy, declared in 2020 that New Jersey would be the “national capital of offshore wind.” He repeatedly raised the state’s goal for the amount of electricity that would be supplied from turbines in the ocean until it was 11,000 megawatts, more than a third of the national goal that had been set by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Three huge projects that had been devised for swaths of the ocean off New Jersey’s coast were canceled.
Another blow to the region’s renewable energy goals came in March when the federal government reached a deal to allow TotalEnergies, a French company that had spent about $1 billion on ocean-floor leases, to redirect that money to oil and gas projects. The company had planned to develop two offshore wind farms that would have supplied electricity to New York City and New Jersey.
New Jersey joined New York and six other states in suing the federal government in September over settlements with offshore lease owners that the states called illegal.
New York is already receiving power from a small wind farm east of Long Island and has two larger projects under construction that are scheduled to be completed next year after being slowed by the Trump administration. This month, a large offshore project that serves Massachusetts and another that supplies Connecticut and Rhode Island announced that they had became fully operational.
“New Jersey is left out now,” said Doug O’Malley, the director of Environment New Jersey. “Other states do have a leg up, both in the timing of their projects and the fact that they have steel in the water.”
Positions on wind energy are divided along party lines more sharply in New Jersey than in other Northeastern states, Mr. O’Malley said.
There is “very spirited opposition” by Jersey Shore residents, Mr. O’Malley said, who have complained that fields of giant turbines on the horizon would be so unsightly that they would drive off summer tourists and drive down property values. They also blamed a spate of whale deaths along the Atlantic coast on early-stage work in the offshore lease areas.
A prominent environmental group, Clean Ocean Action, joined the opposition, calling for the industrial development to be slowed until there was enough information about its impacts on the ocean and marine life.
“We have not abandoned the issue,” said Cindy Zipf, the executive director of Clean Ocean Action. “We’re still very concerned.”
Ms. Zipf said her group does not endorse candidates or take partisan stances, but felt that its concerns were “paved over” by elected officials and the offshore wind industry. She said she hoped that the questions of whether and how to proceed with offshore wind development would not be answered “from a political lens” but using “due diligence, due process and good science.” Mr. O’Malley acknowledged that New Jersey would have to reset its long-term plan for harnessing offshore wind, estimating that the soonest an offshore wind farm could be financed, constructed and connected to New Jersey’s energy grid would be sometime in the 2030s.
“Certainly for New Jersey this is not just running it back,” he said. “This will be a new process. That takes time.”
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