Trump’s pledge looms over offshore wind sector - Boston News, Weather, Sports

The offshore wind industry in Massachusetts has spent the last several years trying to find its footing, aided by powerful Beacon Hill Democrats who have called the renewable energy necessary to state decarbonization mandates and a boon for the economy. Now, in the face of industry setbacks, a president hostile to the industry is about to step into the Oval Office.

At a rally in May , President-elect Donald Trump said he intends to target offshore wind power immediately upon taking office.

"We are going to make sure that that ends on Day 1," Trump said in his May speech, according to NBC . "I'm going to write it out in an executive order. It's going to end on Day 1... They destroy everything, they're horrible, the most expensive energy there is. They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales."

Rep. Jeff Roy, who co-chairs the Legislature's Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy — the chief clean energy and climate change committee in the state — said he is "very concerned" about that threat.

His counterpart in the Senate, Chairman Mike Barrett, also said there's "lots of reason for concern" but feels "it's premature to write the obituary for offshore wind."

"In Massachusetts, offshore wind is key to our efforts here to reach our climate goals by 2050," Roy said. "An abrupt change in policy like that is going to interrupt that work, and it's going to compromise our ability not only to get the renewable energy that we need to achieve our goals, but it's going to interfere with our ability to gain energy independence, and it's going to interfere with our ability to jump start a new industry and all of the economic development that comes along with that."

Massachusetts needs to prepare to "once again lead the way despite resistance," Roy said, and stand ready to continue work on offshore wind against a president who he said wants to "stifle the progress we've made."

During his first four years in office, the Trump administration forced a multi-year delay of the Vineyard Wind 1 project off of Martha's Vineyard which was originally supposed to be the first major offshore wind farm in the country.

That project is now being built but had only a handful of the 62 planned wind turbines generating 68 megawatts of power before it was shut down amid an investigation of a July blade failure. The full project is expected to generate 800 megawatts when completed.

There's also tension over the unknown price impacts of new offshore wind projects whose contract terms are being negotiated privately. And in addition to a backlash against wind projects due to debris that washed up on Nantucket from the summertime blade failure, the New Bedford Light reported that some blades built for Vineyard Wind have been shipped to France from New Bedford, "apparently due to a manufacturing defect that has resulted in layoffs and suspensions at the blade manufacturing plant in Gaspé, Quebec.

As for the threat of the executive order, Roy said he is not as concerned about projects currently under construction, that are fully permitted and subject to contractual agreements — but rather for the 2,400 megawatts that have been authorized but not yet procured.

"I am concerned about him muddying the waters and potentially dragging those projects down. We hit a few bumps in the road already. We do not need additional antagonism from a president who does not believe that climate change is real," Roy said.

Dan Dolan of the New England Power Generators Association, the trade association that represents over 90 percent of the electric generating capacity in the region, agreed with Roy in his concerns.

"This creates tremendous challenges for the offshore wind industry overall, and specifically for New England, where offshore wind is being planned for such a major component of all incremental new electricity production necessary as we further electrify the economy and expect to see electricity demand growth," Dolan said.

He also expressed concerns specifically for the 2,400 megawatts of wind in the current bid cycle.

"This is where it gets really tricky," Dolan said. "For the projects that are under construction and under development, I'm fairly confident that those projects are going to get done. For those that are not yet permitted, or only have some permits, I think it's going to be a challenging road."

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on Friday completed their review of the proposed SouthCoast Wind project, located 30 miles south of Martha's Vineyard. If approved, the project could generate 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, enough to power over 800,000 homes.

The feds' completion of the environmental review represents a major step towards getting the 147-turbine development closer to permitting ahead of the incoming Trump administration.

Dolan said developers are going to have to learn to "speak the language and priorities of the incoming administration."

Barrett echoed a similar sentiment.

"If I were a large energy company, I would be pressing him. I would be nudging him towards an 'all of the above' strategy, which a lot of Republicans already support, and for good reason," Barrett said.

The Senate TUE chair said private developers, not Democrat-led state governments, will have to try to convince the Trump administration that there is money to be made in offshore wind.

The states that generate the most wind power in the U.S. are Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Illinois, according to the Energy Information Administration.

"The companies doing onshore wind development are some of the same companies attempting to do offshore wind development. So if you've got some very red states invested in wind energy, and you've got a lot of jobs being created by Joe Biden's tax credits directed at battery factories and wind energy and solar. And if these companies have reason to want to work with Republicans — this is one area where red states and blue states may find a common interest in nudging the president-elect toward an 'all of everything approach,'" Barrett said.

He continued, "There are a lot of business people who want to make a buck off wind energy, and they probably can find a way to get Donald Trump's ear."

Brad Campbell, the president of the Conservation Law Foundation, anticipated that Trump may face legal challenges with a potential executive order to stop new offshore wind development, and said he felt the industry's momentum in New England would be hard to slow.

"The success of executive orders that attempt to make sweeping changes have had very limited success, and there's a certain irony in that many of the right-wing legal challenges to Biden's executive orders, most notably in the context of student debt, have sharply limited what any president can do by executive order," Campbell said.

He said Trump may have "some levers to interfere or slow down momentum, or at least attempt to" but he is skeptical over whether he'd be successful.

"Ironically, the fossil fuel industry's success in winning both court decisions and legislation to make it harder for the federal government to deny permits to energy projects may help renewable energy as much as it will the fossil fuel industry," Campbell said.

Trump spent the weeks leading up to his recent election continuing to bash the industry, recently appearing on a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan where he cited concerns he had about wind turbines affecting whales.

The president-elect said he wants to be a "whale psychiatrist," and said whales are washing up on shore linked to offshore wind turbines.

"The wind drives them crazy," Trump told Rogan. "It's a vibration. You know, those things are 50-story buildings, some of them. Fifty. And the wind is rushing, the things are blowing. It's a vibration. And it makes noise.... It drives the whales freaking crazy."

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which is charged with protecting marine animals, says on their website : "There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities."

There have been more humpback whale mortalities along the Atlantic coast — where offshore wind farms have cropped up — since 2016, NOAA has said, and they say they will continue to gather data to help determine the cause of those strandings and deaths, though they do not link the mortalities to the sites.

"Environmentalists, they don't talk about it," Trump said on Rogan's podcast.

Roy responded to Trump's comments, calling it a "thoroughly debunked myth."

"The federal government has thoroughly studied that particular issue, and they say that it's the netting from fishing and other types of activity that's killing the whales, not wind turbines," Roy said. "I firmly believe that myth has been thoroughly debunked. But this is a president that doesn't necessarily care about facts. And the more he says it, the more people believe it, unfortunately."

On Rogan's podcast, Trump added that he thinks there's "nothing uglier" than wind farms.

"I see it in Scotland. I see it all over the world. You have this beautiful valley. It's been there for, you know, in civilization, thousands of years, but millions of years, and all of a sudden you have these ugly windmills," Trump said.

It was a sentiment echoed by his running mate, now-Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.

Vance, also on Rogan's podcast , recently said, "I think wind is the biggest scam out there. It's total bullshit. They're ugly."

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