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DONALD TRUMP’S MADCAP CRUSADE AGAINST WIND  
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Ryan Cooper
August 26, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ A wind project off Rhode Island is more than 80 percent completed.
Trump just stopped it in its tracks. _

Turbines operate at the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode
Island., Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo

 

Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to make your electricity
bills go up. As my colleague David Dayen outlined recently
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he is moving heaven and earth to stop renewable-energy
projects—which made up more than 95 percent of new generating
capacity in the first half of this year—most especially, wind.
Future blackouts are practically guaranteed.

Now Trump’s war on wind has escalated to possibly canceling a huge
project that is almost finished:
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Revolution Wind project, about 12 miles south of the eastern edge of
Rhode Island. Construction started in 2023, and is reportedly more
than 80 percent finished, with 45 out of 65 turbines installed, and
power projected to start flowing next year.

But the Trump administration has issued a stop-work order on the
project, with a letter
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acting Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Matthew
Giacona. He is supposedly worried that that construction is “carried
out in a manner that provides for protection of the environment” and
is “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of
national security interests … and prevention of interference with
reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone.” The administration
is also attempting to block another wind project off the coast of
Maryland, the details of which were first reported by Heatmap News
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now confirmed by Bloomberg
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though that one is still in its early stages.

It’s anybody’s guess as to whether Trump intends to stop these
projects permanently, or is just angling to dip his beak in their
funding as he recently did with Nvidia
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But given his relentless anti-renewable animus, I’d guess it’s the
former. Regarding Revolution Wind, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the
developer Ørsted are considering legal action.

Canceling—or even delaying—the Rhode Island project in particular
is so pointlessly, self-harmingly stupid that it would not have even
occurred to any previous administration, including Trump’s first
one. Revolution Wind would provide
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megawatts of reliable clean power, or enough for 350,000 homes, as
well as reduce carbon emissions by more than a million tons per year.
Ørsted carried out
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infrastructure projects to move the project along, including a major
upgrade of the New London port to handle the gigantic turbine blades.

Connecticut and Rhode Island, which have some of the highest
electricity costs
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the country, were banking on this project. It was financed by a power
purchase agreement with state utilities for less than ten cents per
kilowatt-hour, and without it they will have to rely even more on
fossil gas–generated power, whose price is spiking across the
country thanks to the data center buildout.

In short, we are talking about flushing potentially billions in
investment down the toilet for no reason.

The purported justifications here are preposterous. As to the
environment, this is the most anti-environment administration in
American history. Nobody bending over backwards to expand coal
subsidies
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about whether a wind farm harms Rhode Island fisheries or whatever. As
to the exclusive economic zone, it’d be hard to imagine a better use
of it than a relatively low-impact, badly needed electricity project.

As to national security, the project underwent the typical grueling
regulatory review
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including consultation with dozens of local governments, federal
agencies, and the military. A bunch of turbines more than ten miles
offshore is just not going to meaningfully interfere with the Navy or
national security—except by increasing and diversifying our domestic
energy supply, which is to say strengthening it.

Unusually for the Trump administration, whose decisions often turn on
which toadying half-wit had the president’s ear most recently, the
war on wind is personal. Trump simply _loathes_ wind turbines (or
“windmills,” as he calls them). His hatred apparently stems from
an incident across the pond, when the Scottish government proposed to
put a smallish wind farm off the coast of his golf course near
Aberdeen. Trump hated the idea, fought the project in court for years,
eventually lost, and had to pay Scotland’s legal fees
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boot. The turbines are “some of the ugliest you’ve ever
seen,” he said
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visit.

I have always found this view baffling. Of all the forms of power
generation, wind turbines are surely the _most_ aesthetically
appealing. What’s not to like about a forest of big turbines, their
sinuously curved blades slowly and quietly spinning as they harvest
electricity from the air—especially far out to sea where they
don’t even take up land? It sure looks a lot better than a
smoke-belching coal power plant, or even a solar farm. I suppose it
shouldn’t be surprising that Trump—who every day adds
additional hideously gaudy gilded ornaments
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the White House, making it look steadily more like a C-tier Las Vegas
brothel—has appalling taste.

In any case, Trump often complains
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offshore wind is unreliable, but this is the opposite of true. Half
the point of putting wind turbines offshore, which adds a lot of cost
and complexity, is because the wind blows a lot harder and more
steadily out in the ocean. America has stupendous offshore wind
potential, estimated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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turbines producing 13,567 terawatt-hours of electricity—or about
three times as much as America’s entire production
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And the best place of all is a chunk of the Atlantic continental shelf
stretching from the tip of Long Island to about 100 miles east of Cape
Cod, where the wind is strong and the sea is shallow enough that
turbines can be fixed rather than floating—which is why Revolution
Wind is there in the first place, and partly why Ørsted did so many
infrastructure upgrades. It could have been the first of a literal sea
of turbine projects producing clean, affordable electricity for the
whole region.

But not if Trump has anything to say about it. This project might get
completed eventually—he tried repeatedly
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stop a similar wind project off Long Island, and eventually backed
down—but so long as he is president, that vast potential will remain
untapped. If it’s good for America, Donald Trump is against it.

_Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the Prospect, and author of ‘How
Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question
in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The
Week._

* wind turbines
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* Renewable energy
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* Trump
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* climate destruction
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