Donald Trump has been an enemy of wind power for a long time — and he’s not going to let a little energy crisis get in the way of his vendetta.
It seems to have started in 2006, when Trump purchased a seaside estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with plans to build a golf course, and railed against an incoming offshore wind project in the area. He lost that battle, but he’s been fighting wind energy ever since. The latest turn came last week, when the president’s administration announced it would be paying a French energy company called TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon offshore wind energy projects off of the coasts of New York and North Carolina.
This is happening while the U.S. is facing a potential energy crisis as the price of oil skyrockets due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz amid the war against Iran. Oddly enough, the Department of Interior is framing the payoff as a win for energy costs. “This agreement is yet another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
TotalEnergies has now agreed to invest in natural gas and oil development in the U.S., and to not develop any offshore wind projects in the U.S. going forward. While energy costs continue to rise due to the war in Iran, as well as factors like the demand created by data centers used to power artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is still fighting efforts to produce renewable energy — the cheapest form of energy.
“They’re using taxpayer dollars to increase energy costs and decrease our energy security,” Erin Baker, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tells Rolling Stone. “The last thing we need is to be stopping energy projects — especially ones that are low cost, clean, and not contributing to climate change.”
The payout to TotalEnergies is only the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to kneecap wind energy development. Late last year, the administration attempted to halt numerous ongoing offshore wind energy projects.
The administration tried to stop a project known as Revolution Wind — designed to power over 350,000 homes and businesses in Connecticut and Rhode Island — citing national security concerns. A federal judge ruled that the government hadn’t substantiated these concerns, however, and the project started delivering power to the region in early March.
Another development, called the Virginia Coastal Offshore Wind project, was also targeted by the administration. A federal judge ruled in January that the project could continue, and it started delivering energy in late March. Projects called Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind off the coast of New York were also able to survive Trump’s attempts to halt their completion.
Trump is certainly causing problems for the wind power industry, but he’s been unable to stop it from continuing to grow. The solar and battery industries, additionally, are facing fewer roadblocks and growing at a substantial rate, despite the president’s efforts to snuff out clean energy in favor of more expensive fossil fuels.
“In 2025, even with hostile federal action, wind, solar and battery capacity grew at record rates — adding 50 gigawatts in the U.S.,” Baker says.
The real victim of Trump’s efforts isn’t the wind industry so much as it’s the United States. Julie K. Lundquist, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science and wind energy at John Hopkins University, says that what Trump is doing is making wind energy companies less interested in the U.S. market and harming industry development overall.
“A lot of companies are focusing on markets outside of the United States. There’s attention going away from the U.S. market,” Lundquist says. “The U.S. could be a leader in these cutting-edge industries, but right now we are taking ourselves out of the race and handing that leadership to other countries.”
Lundquist says there’s a lot of technical development and innovation to be done in the wind power industry, and if talented scientists and engineers don’t see a promising future in working on these things in the U.S., they’ll do it elsewhere. This is just one of many examples of the Trump administration causing a brain drain in the U.S.
“Conversations with my European colleagues range from ‘I’m so sorry this is happening to you, and what can we do to help?’ to just a general bewilderment at how quickly the world has changed in ways that are not very good,” Lundquist adds. “Some in Europe see the U.S. conceding its lead in this technical area as an advantage for them, but most in the industry would rather see every country contributing creative solutions to problems.”
Trump won’t be able to kill the wind industry, but he is doing real harm to wind power development and putting not only energy sources but jobs at risk. At a time when many fossil fuel industry experts are saying a barrel of oil could soon cost $200, it would seem like a good time to be supporting a source of energy that’s cheap, reliable, and doesn’t need to be imported from abroad. Trump seems to be more concerned with turning the screws on the industry that threatened the view from one of his golf properties two decades ago.
