The Trump administration took action in December to delay the construction of five offshore wind farms being built in US waters. This shows that hostility to the sector will continue in 2026 despite Trump’s promises of “peace on Earth”.
Did you expect President Trump to stick to his new year’s resolution?
During a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago Resort in Florida, Trump told reporters that his resolution for 2026 was “peace on Earth”. That looked good for two days until the US launched strikes on Venezuela on 3rd January and captured the country’s President Nicolas Maduro. We can only assume that, like most people, Trump was putting off starting his resolutions until Monday 5th January.
The already-strained “peace on Earth” pledge has forced us to ask another question about renewable energy though. Does that mean the Trump administration is going to seek a more peaceful approach to offshore wind?
Again, it looks like a clear ‘no’.
On 22nd December, the US Department of the Interior continued the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind by ordering a halt to work on five offshore wind farms that are under construction and suspended their leases.
The Interior Department said this would “address emerging security risks such as potential impacts on military radar. It said the increased ‘clutter’ these projects introduced on radars meant the military could miss legitimate security threats.
Doug Burgum, US interior secretary, said: “Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers. The Trump administration will always prioritise the security of the American people.”
The five projects are Dominion Energy’s 2.6GW Coastal Virginia, which is due to be commissioned in late 2026; Equinor’s 810MW Empire Wind 1, due in 2027; Ørsted’s 924MW Sunrise Wind, due in 2027; the Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables 704MW tie-up Revolution Wind, due in 2026; and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid joint venture Vineyard Wind 1, which has headline capacity of 806MW and where commissioning started in January 2024 with full commissioning due early this year.
In response, governors of four states with affected projects – Connecticut’s Ned Lamont, Massachusetts’s Maura Healey, New York’s Kathy Hochul, and Rhode Island’s Dan McKee – wrote to Burgum on 24th December to call on the Interior Department to lift the stop-work orders.
They wrote that the five projects had already been the subject of extensive federal review, including on the topic of security, and called the move “irrational and erratic”. They called the Interior Department’s concerns a “pretextual excuse” to justify actions in line with Trump’s personal opposition to offshore wind farms. This also led to falls in the share prices of publicly-traded utilities Dominion and Ørsted.
The governors’ position was backed by Liz Burdock, chief executive of industry association Oceantic Network, who called the stop-work orders “another veiled attempt to hide the fact that the President doesn’t like offshore wind” and that this would raise energy costs for Americans, deter investment in the US, and put thousands of people out of work.
She said: “Offshore wind is delivering a more secure maritime industry, investing in shipyards and steel plants and ports to further protect our nation. The US needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy, not an all-out assault on renewable energy based on personal preference.”
Last Friday (2nd January), Ørsted revealed it was taking legal action against the stop-work order, and Dominion Energy has already done likewise. Dominion filed a federal lawsuit on 29th December for a temporary restraining order against the decision, which it called “arbitrary and capricious” and said contained “no rational basis”.
However, the utility was disappointed as Justice Jamar Walker from the District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that Dominion’s request should be dealt with as a request for a preliminary injunction against the administration’s policy, and not the emergency injunction that the utility wanted. The company now faces a longer and slower process to gain its injunction.
This means that, for all Trump’s talk of peace, the challenges for US offshore wind investors and developers are even greater than those that have existed since the inauguration almost a year ago, on 20th January 2026, for his second presidential term. His key orders that day included an immediate moratorium on the permitting of new sites for offshore wind farms, but throughout 2025 he showed his intention to hold back already-permitted projects. Now those being built are affected too.
There has been some court pushback. On 8th December, judge Patti Saris of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts declared that Trump’s January 2025 executive order blocking wind energy projects was unlawful.
Saris ruled in favour of a coalition of state attorney generals from 17 states and Washington DC, led by New York’s attorney general Letitia James. She ruled the indefinite pause was “arbitrary and capricious” as agencies had not explained with total suspension was needed. Her decision eliminates the effect of this order, although this is unlikely to hold back federal policies that enact Trump’s hostility towards the offshore wind industry.
Not that this will surprise developers and investors, who have been aware of the risk of a second Trump term long before he came to power for a second time. It would now be an extremely brave business that would bet on the health of the US offshore wind industry for the next three years, and most of them will be looking at other sectors or markets.
The main question is whether Trump will continue his assault on projects that are already being built or are near completion, as that introduces an additional level of risk for investors and developers of all types of projects. Companies cannot operate sensibly when there is a major risk that their projects will be cancelled after they have spent millions of dollars.
Trump’s resolution about “peace on Earth” may have been a great soundbite, but his actions against offshore wind investors in late December, and indeed in Venezuela last week, show that we should not expect major changes in 2026.
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