U.S. offshore wind is in the doldrums
Credit: "Facing a Hostile Administration, U.S. Offshore Wind Is in Retreat" • By Andrew S. Lewis • October 23, 2025 • e360.yale.edu ~~
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To be sure, the U.S. offshore wind industry was already facing mounting challenges before Trump returned to office this year.
During the Biden years, offshore wind development was pushed along at breakneck speed. BOEM held six auctions that carved out over 30 offshore wind lease areas amounting to millions of acres of seafloor. In turn, states courted the streams of developers who had purchased the leases and needed to connect their farms to onshore transmission stations. In the case of some projects, seabed surveying – which uses sonar that could be loud enough to harm marine species, especially whales and dolphins – was conducted before environmental impact statements were done.
This ignited intense opposition from coastal communities and the fishing industry. Commercial fishermen argued that large swaths of their lucrative grounds would become off-limits due to habitat destruction and the risk of fishing gear being lost or damaged from snagging on transmission cables or other infrastructure. Some scientists and environmentalists, who otherwise supported clean energy, raised concerns about the cumulative impacts of thousands of huge, noisy turbines operating in the middle of the migration routes of critical marine and avian species.
Most critically, though, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine splintered the global supply chain, hiking the prices of many of the components needed for offshore wind development. The manufacturers were the first to back out of the U.S. market – in 2023, Siemens Gamesa scrapped plans to build turbine blades in Virginia, while turbine engine manufacturer Vestas failed to establish a facility at a New Jersey port that would have assembled nacelles – engines – for turbines. And, in January, the Italy-based cable manufacturer Prysmian informed Massachusetts that it wouldn’t be moving forward with plans to repurpose a plant that once housed a coal-fired power generator into an offshore wind transmission cable factory.
