New York’s offshore wind industry is under assault from the Trump administration

When President Donald Trump took office in January, he ordered the federal government to hit the brakes on all offshore wind permitting and leasing, putting thousands of megawatts of clean energy at risk in the tristate area. New York already has one offshore wind farm online and had two more under construction until the Trump administration halted work on one on April 16.

Last week, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to issue a pause on construction at Empire Wind 1, a planned wind farm 14 miles south of Jones Beach State Park. Even though Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to fight the decision, it’s clear that even projects that have their federal approvals in place will face four long years of delays and headwinds. Offshore wind developers that don’t have their permits from the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies are looking at an even longer timeline. Equinor, the developer of Empire Wind 1, said in a statement that it would suspend offshore construction immediately and faced the possibility of repaying $1.5 billion to its lenders and termination fees to suppliers “in a full stop scenario.”

And former Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin heads Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, which has the power to block both pre-construction and permitted projects by withholding Clean Air Act permits for offshore wind. It already happened off the coast of New Jersey, where the EPA revoked an environmental permit last month from the massive, 1,500-megawatt Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind project, which had all its federal approvals in place. Zeldin is also seeking to claw back $20 billion in federal clean energy funding from states, which was supposed to help governments and companies finance wind, solar and battery projects. Congressional Republicans are also pushing to repeal key pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which contained $369 billion in clean energy incentives, including valuable investment and production tax credits that renewable energy developers rely on to finance their projects. But 21 House Republicans announced their opposition to the tax credit cuts in March, arguing that rolling back the subsidies would trigger higher energy bills for constituents and the collapse of major construction and manufacturing projects for clean energy in their districts.

All of these roadblocks are a problem for New York state, which is supposed to generate 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040. Those targets, set by the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, have incentivized the state to invest in offshore wind, upstate solar installations, onshore wind farms and hydroelectric transmission lines from Canada.

“There are definitely reasons to worry about what the Trump administration is trying to do on clean energy – both in trying to interfere in the permitting process and the push to repeal tax credits for clean energy in Congress,” said Pat McClellan, policy director at the New York League of Conservation Voters. “If in 2028 we elect a new president that understands the importance of clean energy, this might be a hiccup, but who knows what’s going to happen. I do think that (meeting the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goals) is still feasible, but it will be a much heavier lift than we thought when we passed CLCPA in 2019.”

The wind projects off the coast of Long Island were expected to generate 9,000 megawatts of electricity in the next decade, which would be enough to power 6 million homes, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Offshore wind is also the most realistic way to decarbonize the electric grid in downstate New York, which accounts for just over half of statewide energy consumption but has very few affordable properties that could host large-scale wind farms or solar panel installations.

“We need more power to serve downstate,” said Alicia Artessa, director of the New York Offshore Wind Alliance, a group of environmental organizations and offshore wind developers. “However there’s significant land constraints and property costs. You can’t build more onshore wind in Manhattan.”

But there are still ways that the state can advance New York’s offshore wind industry during the Trump administration, including preparing for new offshore wind projects, investing in ports and manufacturing for offshore wind, advancing its cap-and-trade program, and building transmission lines that connect offshore projects with parts of New York City and Long Island, according to clean energy activists.

“If there’s a federal pause on offshore wind, it doesn’t mean that the states have to pause every piece of offshore wind development,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president for energy and environment at the Regional Plan Association. “We’re not going to get new lease areas with new projects, but states can do the planning and thinking to get transmission lines done, to get ports in shape to build offshore wind when it comes back.”

At this point, New York has one offshore wind development in operation, South Fork Wind, located about 35 miles east of Montauk on Long Island’s eastern tip. The 132-megawatt project, which came online in 2024 as the country’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm, generates enough power for 70,000 Long Island homes. Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind, which is situated 30 miles east of Long Island, were expected to generate 810 and 924 megawatts, respectively. Those two wind farms, which both received federal permits under the Biden administration, would only get New Yorkers 20% of the way to the state’s offshore wind electricity goals.

So, clean energy advocates argue that the state can and should continue pushing its offshore wind projects forward, even if the Trump administration is making it increasingly difficult to build in the short term. Offshore wind farms can take a decade or more to finance and construct because they cost billions of dollars, require several state and federal permits, and require large, specialized pieces like turbines that have to be manufactured in Europe or Asia and shipped to the U.S. And there are engineering challenges with offshore construction, which requires specialized boats and port infrastructure that can support offshore wind, laying foundations on the sea floor or on large reinforced platforms in the ocean, installing multi-ton turbines in pieces and laying transmission cables both in the sea and on land. Ultimately, even if developers put their projects on ice while Trump is in office, they can still come back to them in a few years when a different president will be in power.

Thus far, the state has taken at least one notable step toward developing new projects during the Trump administration. NYSERDA said it is proceeding with New York’s fifth offshore wind solicitation, which is the process by which the state negotiates contracts with offshore developers. A spokesperson for NYSERDA did not say when the results would be announced, and the agency website says the new contracts would be executed in the first quarter of 2025.

There’s also the state’s plan to award $500 million in funding for ports and manufacturing infrastructure, which the governor originally set aside in the 2022 state budget. The state provisionally awarded $300 million to LM Wind Power and GE Vernova, the largest onshore wind turbine manufacturer in the U.S., in 2023. GE was supposed to use that money to build a factory for offshore wind turbine parts along the Hudson River near Albany. However, the company decided not to build a larger, 18-megawatt turbine that multiple offshore wind developers in New York and New Jersey needed. GE’s about-face forced the state to cancel provisional contracts for three major offshore wind projects – Attentive Energy One, Community Offshore Wind and Excelsior Wind. Those developers had submitted their bids and cost estimates with the promise of GE’s bigger turbine, which would save them money because it required less manpower during installation and fewer turbines to produce the same amount of energy. Ultimately, NYSERDA said that GE’s decision “caused material changes to projects,” and negotiations for all three contracts fell apart, according to energy news outlet Canary Media. The state canceled the $300 million in funding in April 2024 and has yet to announce new awardees.

“NYSERDA’s fifth offshore wind solicitation (ORECRFP24-1 or “NY5”) and its offshore wind supportive manufacturing and logistics solicitation (OSWSCRFP24-1) are both ongoing,” a NYSERDA spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “The results of the NY5 solicitation and the supportive manufacturing and logistics solicitation will be announced after contracts have been finalized and executed.”

Since Trump was elected, a few offshore wind developers have paused or pulled out of their projects on the East Coast, citing uncertainty in the U.S. offshore wind market. For example, New Jersey’s Atlantic Shores project – which recently lost its EPA permit – took a hit in January when one of its developers, Shell, decided to exit the project after reporting a $1 billion loss in its offshore wind division. Plus, the Trump administration’s move to pause construction at Empire Wind 1 may put Equinor’s construction work to revitalize the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which would serve as a hub for the offshore wind project, in jeopardy. Environmental advocates argue that New York can help reinforce energy investor confidence in the state by finalizing more offshore wind project contracts and by investing the $500 million for manufacturing and port upgrades.

“I think doing all of that would show the world that New York is open for business and has a future in the offshore wind industry, and that it’s going to keep the offshore wind industry alive until Trump is gone,” said Nathanael Greene, the director of renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s clear signaling to investors that New York needs this power and is not going to give up just because Trump is doing some crazy stuff.”

Planning and constructing new transmission lines is another big factor in connecting offshore wind and other renewable energy sources to Westchester County, Long Island and New York City. The state’s electrical grid operator, the New York Independent System Operator, launched a solicitation last year for proposals to build new transmission lines to New York City, with the aim of delivering nearly 4,800 megawatts of offshore wind power to the five boroughs.

Separately, New York Independent System Operator has signed off on Propel NY Energy, a plan to build 70 miles of new electric transmission lines across Long Island and the Long Island Sound, linking the North Shore to New Rochelle in Westchester County. Another transmission line would run from Uniondale, snaking along the Queens waterfront to a substation in the Tremont section of the Bronx. But, the federal government might block that project too. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has to issue a permit for Propel NY, told Newsday last month that it was scrutinizing the project in light of Trump’s executive orders forbidding new offshore wind permits and declaring a national energy emergency.

In April, the White House released two more executive orders targeting renewable energy. “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach” directs the U.S. attorney general to crack down on state and local government programs designed to limit carbon emissions, including California’s cap-and-trade carbon credit program and New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act. The latter legislation, signed by Hochul in December, forces fossil fuel companies to help fund flood mitigation systems, seawalls and other infrastructure aimed at protecting New Yorkers from the effects of climate change. Another executive order takes aim at all energy and environmental regulation, tasking the Department of Energy, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of the Interior, the EPA and several other agencies to add sunset dates to every major environmental or energy law in the U.S. code.

The state environmental overreach executive order could slow New York’s work on its own cap-and-invest carbon credit program, on which advocates have been demanding more progress. After the governor’s office announced an indefinite delay to the program in January, environmental groups formed New Yorkers for Clean Air to pressure the governor into releasing the regulations that would govern it. Cap and invest would set an annual, declining cap on carbon emissions statewide, and allow major greenhouse gas emitters that exceed the cap to purchase carbon credits that help offset their emissions. The state Department of Environmental Conservation released an initial piece of draft regulations – a greenhouse gas emission reporting rule – in late March, but the state has yet to put out the rest of the cap-and-invest rules. The revenue generated by the program would go toward offsetting the $15 billion annual cost of New York’s green energy program.

“The conservative estimate is that it would raise $3 billion a year and increase over time,” McClellan said. “Through the 2030s it would be generating really significant revenue for action.”

Ultimately, advocates wondered about the legality of the Trump administration blocking offshore wind projects at the federal level, especially in light of the EPA revoking a previously approved permit for Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind in New Jersey. 

“If they’re pulling permissions for things that have already been granted or refusing to issue permits, I think developers would have a case that that’s arbitrary and capricious,” McClellan said. “The federal government cannot just revoke a permit that they’ve already approved just because they feel like it or because Trump ordered it.”

NRDC’s Greene made a similar argument and pointed to the human and economic costs of delaying offshore wind projects.

“If you have all your permits, can the federal government just pull the rug out from under you?” he asked. “Can the federal government just take people’s property? It’s not hard to add up human costs and dollar costs. It’s clearly putting people out of jobs and driving up project costs.”