The Trump administration’s executive order “temporarily” paused wind power development in the U.S. In May a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general challenged the EO with a lawsuit. Which action prevails is the key to wind power’s future in the U.S.

May Day

On the first Monday in May a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general representing 18 States and the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston against the Trump administration’s move to halt wind power development. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said of the suit that it was an “unlawful attempt to freeze the development of wind energy.”

Campbell’s New York state counterpart Attorney General Letitia James, concurred and citing in her remarks the damage the halt to wind power could cause, “This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy. This arbitrary and unnecessary directive threatens the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and it is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.”

Also on May 5th, Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown announced that the state had joined the coalition of AGs fighting Trump’s EO, saying in a release, “The Trump administration’s outrageous and unlawful freeze on wind energy development is nothing short of a direct assault on Maryland’s future climate security and economic prosperity. Wind power provides hardworking Marylanders with well-paying jobs, strengthens our power grid, and helps us fight the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change.”

A Freezing Wind

However, when President Trump returned to the White House in January among his first executive orders [January 20th, 2025 “Unleashing American Energy”], was to put a temporary freeze on federal permitting and loans for all onshore and offshore wind projects, saying “we’re not going to do the wind thing.”

The AGs suit was triggered because of this executive order back in January. Wind power both onshore and offshore has been successful in not only adding gigawatts and resilience to the grid, but it has also been as AG Brown noted, a job-creator.

With the freeze, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) temporarily put on hold a reported 168 renewable energy projects, many of which were related to wind power. Although the main impacts were on wind projects located on federal land or federal leasing zones in offshore waters, the pause also included renewable projects located on private lands.

Despite the administration’s distain for wind power projects, wind power has been a bright spot for the U.S. economy. According to the IEA (International Energy Agency), since January 2024, U.S. wind energy consumption has increased by 25%. And three states, Rhode Island (30 MW), Virginia (12 MW) and New York (132 MW) already have offshore wind operations while many more have projects in the pipeline.

The Biden administration set a national offshore wind power goal of 30 gigawatts of capacity by 2030 and 110 gigawatts by 2050. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) now believes “the U.S. will have, optimistically less than 5 gigawatts in operation by 2030.”

And the impacts of Trumps EOs are already being felt. In April Trump administration took a more aggressive step against wind in April when it ordered the Norwegian company Equinor to halt construction on Empire Wind, a fully permitted project located southeast of Long Island, New York, that is about 30% complete.

In February 2025, Shell left the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, and the project’s bidding process was canceled by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU). According to the NJBPU, the reasoning behind the cancelation was both Shell’s withdrawal, and uncertainty due to federal actions. The NJBPU President, Christine Guhl-Sadovy, said, “The Board concluded that an award in New Jersey’s fourth offshore wind solicitation, despite the manifold benefits the industry offers to the state, would not be a responsible decision at this time.”

And it isn’t just about the wind farm projects themselves; other facets of power investment are also being crippled. In 2022, the Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian initially agreed to build a $200 million facility to build subsea transmission cables at the Brayton Point site (a decommissioned coal-fired power plant that shutdown in 2017) in Somerset, Massachusetts for the New England Wind project. In January with anti-wind power sentiment blowing in from Washington, the cable-maker walked away from the deal.

Other Barriers to Wind

While the operating costs of wind farms are lower than fossil fuel plants, the upfront cost of investing in wind projects can be high. This means that wind farm projects are extremely sensitive to instability in the economic landscape. COVID-19, persistent inflation, as well as other recent events in the political landscape, have caused pricing and demand to shoot up for logistics, materials, and labor. This makes the already high entry price for a project even higher. And the current tariffs in the United States are threatening the stability of many supply chains, including those of wind power projects.

Wind energy also regularly encounters highly organized resistance from disinformation campaigns often supported by fossil fuel interest groups. This disinformation is widespread. According to a 2024 study in Nature Communications, nearly 30% of the respondents, located in the US, UK, and Australia, believed false claims about wind farms. These false claims range from the environmental to the conspiratorial. It is a common belief that wind farms have an intense negative impact on the ecosystems they are in such as bird strikes and fishing stock loss, and some stranger claims, such as wind farms causing cancer.

Global Wind Power

Although headwinds are slowing offshore wind power projects in the U.S., the same is not true for other countries.

Globally, there is an estimated 83.2 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity with 11 gigawatts in 31 wind farms commissioned in 2024. As Ben Backwell, CEO of Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) said of the current wind power situation globally, “Once again, the wind industry has broken new installation records, despite more challenging macroeconomic headwinds over the last few years.” Adding, “While wind energy continues to drive investment and jobs, improve energy security and lower consumer costs, we are seeing a more volatile policy environment in some parts of the world, including ideologically driven attacks on wind and renewables and the halting of under construction projects, threatening investment certainty.”

Even with the headwinds in the U.S., globally wind power capacity is still increasing. And most prominent of the wind power proponents is China. China currently has added the most wind farms, and China’s Five-Year Plan intends for 18% of the renewable energy involved to come from wind, as well as solar. The European Union (EU), as well, is attempting to pivot to renewable energy, including wind. The European Wind Action Plan, which was announced in October of 2023, was set up to create guidelines and help to accelerate the wind energy movement.

The Future: Wind’s Day in Court?

One of the great ironies of the Trump administration’s opposition to wind power is how damaging the “temporary” pause in expanding wind power is to the administration base and to their overall economic objectives. The top five wind generating states are Texas (with almost 26% of the total wind generation in the U.S.), Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Illinois. And the opposition makes even less sense when tied to the administrations avowed economic goals. Besides the obvious loss of jobs, investment and revenue from wind power projects, which is at odds with the avowed goals of developing more energy resources — energy resources that need to be inputted into an aging grid to address rising electricity demand from data centers and other emerging technologies. Even the administration’s EO “Maritime Action” plan seems like folly when it dismisses the enormous shipbuilding potential associated building floating offshore wind power platforms and their support systems. A maritime golden age is within the administration’s immediate grasp but is being shoved aside.

So, when wind power finally gets its day in court, it is easy to wonder if many who have expressed opposition in states like Texas and Oklahoma and even in the Republican ranks itself, would secretly like to see a reverse shift back in the wind?