US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’

US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at a press conference on 10 September that offshore wind has no future in the US under the Trump administration and that the government was reviewing five offshore wind projects that are now under construction.

Speaking to the press at the Gastech event in Milan, Italy, Burgum said offshore wind was “too expensive and not reliable enough”.

“Many of those projects weren’t really about electricity, they were about tax subsidies”, said Doug Burgum.

“I think the fact that the subsidies have been either cut back or limited means that it is likely that there will not be future offshore wind built in America.”

Burgum added that there is also opposition to offshore wind due to concerns about the whale population, as well as concerns from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about interference with radar systems.

“A lot of these offshore wind projects were moved [through] a very fast, ideologically driven permitting process. We’ve been asked as part of an executive order from the president to take a whole-of-government approach to review those”, the US Interior Secretary said.

The US government is currently “taking a deep look” into five offshore wind projects that are under construction, Burgum said, without naming the projects.

The latest project that got a stop-work order from the Department of the Interior (DOI) is Revolution Wind, an almost completed offshore wind farm owned by a 50/50 joint venture between Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables.

Earlier this year, this happened to Equinor’s Empire Wind 1.

Currently in the construction phase are also Vineyard Wind 1, owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) and Avangrid, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW), owned by the US company Dominion Energy.

Burgum did not discose whether the above three are also at risk of receiving a stop-work order.

As reported recently, the Trump administration has not only issued stop-work orders for two projects under active offshore construction so far, but is also planning to revoke DOI approvals of Construction and Operations Plans (COPs) for several fully permitted projects.

When speaking about offshore wind, the US Interior Secretary referred to the executive order and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” to point out the efforts made by the government under the new legislative actions to review permitted offshore wind projects and cut support.

However, at the beginning of the press conference, talking about the US energy strategy and the overall approach, Burgum said the administration believes “that innovation, not regulation, is the path forward”.

“There’s been a lot of ideology around energy that climbed in from a climate ideology. But when you start creating a bunch of regulations that stop innovation, that restrict new forms of energy, new approaches, or even in some cases regulation, that is just banning entire categories of fuels and energy sources that are so important to the world today, and will continue to be important. All you’re doing is crushing innovation, but you’re raising prices and raising prices make it unaffordable”, Doug Burgum said.