Offshore wind rentals actually died in the United States following a Trump administration prescription issued last week.
Large stretches of American waters which had been identified by federal agencies as ideal for offshore wind are no longer eligible for such developments as part of a declaration of the internal department published last Wednesday.
In the press release of four sentences, the Ocean Energy Management Bureau (BOEM) said that the US government “disappointment of more than 3.5 million unrelated federal waters previously targeted the development of offshore wind through the American Gulf, the Gulf of Maine, New York Bight, California, Oregon and Central Atlantic.
This decision comes just one day after the interior secretary Doug Burgum ordered his staff to stop “preferential treatment for wind projects” and wrongly “unreliable” wind energy. Analysts say that offshore wind energy can be a reliable form of carbon-free energy, in particular in New England, where the region’s network operator described it as a grid stability. He also followed the Trump Administration’s Assault on the Industry, which included multiple attacks on current projects.
The prospects were already dark for a new offshore wind turbine rental activity after the executive order of President Donald Trump in January which introduced a temporary ban on practice. Wednesday’s announcement makes this policy more final. Wind energy defenders say that it will erase several years of work with federal agencies and local communities to determine the best possible areas for wind development.
“My reading on this subject is that there will be no offshore wind rental in the near future,” said a career employee of the Interior Department, who has granted anonymity for the media so that they could speak freely without fear of reprisals.
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Discovering the best place to place the offshore wind is an involved company. The proposed areas start enormously and, according to internal staff, undergo a prudent multi -year face process to settle on the official “wind energy zone”. The small rental zones are then carved with these wider expanses.
Take the process of appointing the wind energy area known as “Central Atlantic 2”, which started in 2023 and is now died in the water.
The draft zone – or “call zone” – began as a thick belt about 40 miles wide and has reached the southernmost tip of New Jersey to the northern border of South Carolina, according to cards on the Boem website. Several agencies, including the Ministry of Commerce, the Ministry of Defense and NASA, then provided comments on the place where this initial area could have been problematic. NASA, for example, maintains a launch site on the island of Virginie Wallops and in 2024 found that nearby wind turbines could interfere with the agency’s instrumentation and radio frequencies.
The basis did not stop there. By 2024, according to the Boem website, its staff hosted public meetings in person atlantic City, New Jersey, in Morehead City, in North Carolina, to collect the comments of fishermen, tourist outfitters and other stakeholders. Under a wind administration, a final designation and sales notice would probably have been published this year or by 2026, on the basis of a calendar published on the Boem website.
But the Trump administration is not a friend of the offshore wind.
Trump officials have repeatedly targeted wind projects by drawing permits and even interrupting a wind farm during construction. Last month, “Big and Beautiful Bill” by Trump sent federal tax credits in an early tomb, forcing wind developers who wish to use incentives to start construction by July 2026 or place turbines in service by the end of 2027. This decision is particularly devastating for offshore projects that are not already underway. Currently, five large offshore wind farms are under construction in the United States, and when they are online, they will help Virginia states in Massachusetts to meet their growing energy demand with carbon-free power.
The order of last Wednesday interrupts all the work on the central Atlantic 2 and the similar areas, such as a near Guam, and also revokes wind energy areas completely finalized with strong state support. An example is in the Gulf of Maine, where Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, was a fierce defender of the emerging renewable sector.
These wind energy areas could be hypothetically redesigned by future administration or inverted policy, according to the employee of the Interior Department. However, in the best of cases, this means that the developers will have to wait until several additional years for new rental areas to be available, more slowing up an industry whose projects already take many years to go through permits and construction.
