Trump Yanks Millions of Acres of Ocean Designated for Wind
(Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration is revoking approval for millions of acres of ocean to be set aside for offshore wind development amid an escalating attack on the renewable power source.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced Wednesday it was rescinding huge swaths of ocean in the US Outer Continental Shelf initially set aside for the fast-tracking of offshore wind projects by the administration of former President Barack Obama, and expanded by former President Joe Biden.
The move applies to more than 3.5 million acres of federal waters across the Gulf of America, Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight, California, Oregon, and the Central Atlantic.
A day earlier, the Interior Department said it was considering halting all wind development on federal lands and in federal waters amid a broader review of the energy source derided by President Donald Trump as unreliable. Since Trump’s re-election, BloombergNEF’s forecast for new offshore wind developments has fallen by 56%.
Environmental groups slammed the move to revoke the special areas for offshore wind development.
“The Trump administration is going out of its way to manufacture the energy crisis the president promised to resolve,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action. “Offshore wind has massive power potential to strengthen our grid. But instead, Trump is attempting to bully American-made clean energy out of existence to prop up his backers in the fossil fuel industry.”
Meantime, a conservative Texas research institute urged the Trump administration to yank approval for a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, the first to be greenlit by the Biden administration in 2021.
The 62-turbine wind farm is under construction about 12 nautical miles (22.2 kilometers) off Martha’s Vineyard.
A petition filed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has received funding from Koch Industries Inc. said it was acting on “behalf of local fishermen whose livelihoods have been severely impacted” by the Avangrid Grid Inc.’s Vineyard Wind project.
Vineyard Wind didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking a comment and the Interior Department declined to comment.
(Updates with comment from environmental group in paragraphs five and six.)
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