A wind turbine with a broken blade at Vineyard Wind 1, off the coast of Massachusetts, September 10, 2024. The White House has taken the extraordinary step of instructing half a dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the offshore wind industry, as it intensifies its whole-of-government attack on a source of renewable energy that Donald Trump has criticised as ugly, expensive and inefficient. Photo / Randi Baird, The New York Times
The White House has taken the extraordinary step of instructing half a dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry.
It is intensifying its government-wide attack on a source of renewable energy that United States President Donald Trump has criticised as ugly, expensive, and inefficient.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, are leading the effort, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Agencies that typically have little to do with offshore wind power have been drawn into the effort, the two people said.
At the Health and Human Services Department, for instance, officials are studying whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health.
And the Defence Department is probing whether the projects could pose risks to national security.
Last week, Robert F. Kennedy jnr, the US Health and Human Services Secretary, said he was working with Doug Burgum, the Interior Secretary; Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary; Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary; and Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary, as part of a “departmental coalition team” to investigate the risks from offshore wind farms.
“We’re all working together on this issue,” Kennedy said during a Cabinet meeting.
Brigit Hirsch, a spokesperson for Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said that he, too, is involved in discussions about offshore wind at “a high level”.
And Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, last week cancelled or withdrew US$679 million ($1.15 billion) in federal funding for marine terminals, port improvements, and other facilities that were designed to support the offshore wind industry. Duffy called them “wasteful wind projects”.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said that agencies are working to comply with Trump’s January executive order that called for a review of wind projects on federal lands and waters.
“Agencies are implementing that Executive Order by evaluating whether they have any policies in place that would advantage wind developers over more effective and reliable types of energy, such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear,” Kelly wrote in an email.
When the Trump Administration abruptly ordered that construction stop last month at Revolution Wind, a US$4b wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that is 80% complete, it alluded to national security concerns without elaborating.
The Administration has since seized on the idea that offshore wind projects could threaten national security.
“In particular there are concerns about radar relative to undersea, and it doesn’t have to be a large Russian sub, but undersea drones,” Burgum said on CNN last week, referring to the decision to halt construction at Revolution Wind.
“People with bad ulterior motives to the US could launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm. The radar gets very distorted if you’re trying to detect and avoid if you’ve got drones coming.
“It’s a whole range of things that need to be reviewed that I don’t think were,” Burgum said.
Some experts said they were baffled by those comments.
By law, offshore wind projects already undergo an extensive review process by the Defence Department. The Pentagon had participated in a review of Revolution Wind and, in 2023, signed off on modifications that would reduce or avoid effects on military radar operations.
Kennedy has warned that the subsea cables used in offshore wind farms are emitting an electromagnetic field that can harm people and whales. Experts say that these fields are similar to those emitted by many household appliances and there is no evidence that they have negative environmental or health effects.
“The impression they’re leaving, which I think is the truth, is that they’re grasping at straws,” said John Leshy, who served as general counsel for the Interior Department during the Clinton Administration.
Trump has disparaged wind power ever since he failed 14 years ago to stop an offshore wind farm visible from one of his golf courses in Scotland.
He railed against wind and solar power during his presidential campaign last year, when he also promised oil and gas executives that he would make policy changes that would help their industry, such as rolling back environmental rules.
After Trump returned to the White House in January, one of his first orders of business was a sweeping mandate to halt all leasing of federal lands and waters for new wind farms.
His Administration has since gone after wind farms that had been given federal permits by the Biden Administration and were either under construction or about to start.
In April, the Interior Department ordered that work be stopped at Empire Wind, a US$5b wind farm off the coast of New York that had received all necessary approvals from the Biden Administration and was already being built.
After several weeks and negotiations with Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, the Administration allowed Empire Wind to proceed.
White House officials suggested they had done so only after Hochul agreed to approve new gas pipelines in the state. She denied that any such deal had been made.
In August, the Administration shocked the industry by ordering construction halted on Revolution Wind.
It also signalled plans to rescind federal approvals for the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which had not yet begun construction but would consist of up to 114 wind turbines off Ocean City, Maryland.
Last weekend the Trump Administration said in a legal filing that it intended to reconsider the approvals that the Biden Administration had granted the SouthCoast Wind project, about 32km south of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
The town and county of Nantucket have sued to stop the project, which has not begun construction, citing a “rushed and faulty” permitting process. The Administration will make a decision by September 18, according to the filing.
Yesterday, the Trump Administration said in another court filing that it also intended to reconsider federal approvals for the New England Wind project, about 32km south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Construction has not yet begun. If completed, it would be one of the largest offshore wind projects in the country.
There are three additional offshore wind projects in the US that have received federal permits and are under construction: Vineyard Wind, off Martha’s Vineyard; Sunrise Wind, off Long Island, New York; and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, off Virginia Beach.
Over the weekend, the Democratic Governors of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island released a letter warning that revoking permits for offshore wind farms could be destabilising for a wide range of energy projects.
“The US markets operate on certainty.Canceling projects that have already been fully permitted – including some near completion – sends the worrisome message to investors that the work can be stopped on a whim.”
During the Cabinet meeting last week, Kennedy raised concern that debris from a damaged wind turbine blade had washed up on the shores of Nantucket last year. The incident at Vineyard Wind, the country’s second large-scale offshore wind farm, prompted the closure of several beaches to swimmers.
An Interior Department investigation into the cause of that incident is continuing. In the meantime, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative advocacy group with ties to the oil and gas industry, last month petitioned the Administration to rescind Vineyard Wind’s construction and operation plan.
“Our petition is intended to bring Vineyard Wind to the front of the burner, if you will, at the Interior Department,” said Ted Hadzi-Antich, a senior lawyer with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Kennedy’s dislike for offshore wind power dates to his crusade against Cape Wind, a proposed 130-turbine project off Cape Cod.
The Kennedys, one of the country’s most powerful political families, fought the project from its inception in 2001 to its collapse in 2017, saying it threatened the views from their Cape Cod estate. The family’s neighbour, billionaire industrialist William Koch, also spent roughly US$5m fighting the project.
The Interior Department had previously reviewed the potential health and environmental effects of the electromagnetic fields emitted by the undersea cables that connect wind farms to land. The agency’s 102-page report, published last year, concluded that while those fields could potentially have some effect on certain species in the immediate vicinity of the cables, the broader environmental effects were “nonsignificant”.
Since 2006 the US military has studied the potential for offshore wind turbines to disrupt radar. It has generally concluded that the risk is real but can be offset with planning and technological upgrades.
“It’s a false narrative” to say that offshore wind turbines threaten national security, said Kirk Lippold, a retired Navy commander who now writes about energy. “There are a lot of options, including operator training, that can mitigate many of those issues.”
Of Burgum’s warning that drones could attack the US by going through wind farms, Lippold was dismissive.
“If we’re at a point where undersea drones are operating within US territorial waters, that would be an incredible intelligence and military failure,” he said.
“They’re making some very specious arguments to try to justify shutting these wind projects down.”
Written by: Maxine Joselow, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer
Photograph by: Randi Baird
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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