Fourteen months ago, the Trump administration declared a national energy emergency, warning that the country faced rising prices and an increasingly strained grid. While the energy emergency declaration was almost certainly cover for a fossil fuel push, it spoke to a truth about the state of the economy: The U.S. really did, and does, face a genuine need for more power due to rising demand, strained grids, and soaring bills.
But even against that backdrop, the Trump administration has also attacked wind, entirely irrationally. The administration just spent nearly $1 billion of public money to keep zero-fuel-cost generation off a grid that ratepayers are already paying more to power.
The administration has tried and failed — five times, in five courts — to stop offshore wind farms already under construction. Today, it took a different approach. At the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné announced a signed agreement under which TotalEnergies will invest $928 million in LNG and oil production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S. will then reimburse that amount dollar-for-dollar. All it wants in return? Total’s cancellation of two offshore wind leases off New York and North Carolina, and a pledge never to develop offshore wind in the U.S. again.
The deal cancels the 3-gigawatt Attentive Energy project off New York and New Jersey and the 1-GW Carolina Long Bay project off North Carolina, which together would have been enough generation to power 1.3 million homes.
The agreement is the latest move in an absurd campaign that began on day one of Trump’s second term, when he signed an executive order freezing all new federal wind permits, onshore and offshore, and ordering the Interior Department to review existing leases for possible termination. In the year since, he has worked to dismantle the sector project by project.
In August 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cancelled the Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho, a 1-GW facility on federal land that had already completed its full environmental review and received final approval. In December, the administration issued stop-work orders against all five offshore wind projects under construction on the East Coast, citing a classified national security report. Courts blocked all five.
The GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, signed in July 2025, killed the production tax credits that made new offshore projects financeable. BloombergNEF’s forecast for American offshore wind capacity by 2035 stood at 39 GW when Trump won in November 2024, fell to 21.5 GW after tax credit repeal, and now sits at just six GW. The day one moratorium alone put roughly 30 GW of East Coast projects at risk, enough to power more than 12 million homes — right when the country needs new cheap energy most.
What wind does for the U.S.
Wind is not a niche coastal industry. It is the largest renewable electricity source in the U.S., supplying more than 10% of total generation in 2025, and in spring 2024 it exceeded coal output for the first time in history.
Iowa generates 63% of its electricity from wind. Texas has more than 39 GW of installed wind capacity, roughly a quarter of the state’s total power. Kansas, South Dakota, and Oklahoma all generate more than 40% of their electricity from wind. These are not blue states pursuing an ideological agenda. They are agricultural and energy-producing states that found the cheapest electrons available and built around them.
Offshore was supposed to be the next step in developing the American wind industry, and had begun forming a meaningful pipeline. As of early 2025, when Trump took office, the U.S. had just 174 megawatts of offshore wind actually running. But federal lease areas on the East Coast represented a development pipeline of more than 50 GW, spread across dozens of projects in various stages of permitting and construction.
Trump’s promise for lower bills
During the 2024 campaign, Trump told the Economic Club of New York that his energy policies would cut electricity bills in half within 12 months of taking office.
They went up. The average American household paid $110 more for electricity in 2025 than in 2024, a 6.4% increase, according to a Senate report published this month. For context, the promised halving would have required prices to fall to roughly 8 cents per kilowatt-hour; they are now above 17 cents.
There is almost certainly a connection between Trump’s war on wind and the increase of electricity costs.
Wind carries no fuel cost, and grid operators often call on wind before gas or coal because it bids at effectively zero. Offshore wind contracts lock in stable pricing, insulated from commodity swings. A RENEW Northeast analysis found that if 3.5 GW of offshore wind had been operational last winter, New England’s wholesale electricity prices would have been more than 10% lower, saving ratepayers a combined $400 million.
Instead, natural gas prices spiked 17% during Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, and those costs flowed directly into bills. New England’s regional grid operator had already warned publicly that canceling or delaying the under-construction projects would raise costs and threaten reliability.
Virginia may be the best case study for the tangible impacts of cutting major energy supply when demand is growing. The state hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and its energy demand is growing faster than anywhere else in the country. Dominion Energy had been building Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, 2.6 gigawatts and the largest offshore wind project ever attempted in the U.S., specifically to meet that load. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin supported it. PJM, the grid operator serving the mid-Atlantic, had incorporated it into reliability planning.
In December, one day after the first turbine installation vessel left port, the administration froze construction. The project was 60% complete. Dominion said delays were costing more than $5 million a day in vessel losses alone, costs that would eventually fall on ratepayers or the company.
Its statement was direct: The project was “essential for American national security and meeting Virginia’s dramatically growing energy needs, the fastest growth in America,” driven by data centers and military installations. PJM told a federal court that stopping it would cause “irreparable harm to the 67 million Americans” it serves.
Courts blocked the freeze. The administration appealed.
What today’s deal reveals
After going zero for five against the projects already under construction, the administration found a different approach. If courts would not let it stop wind farms from being built, it instead would pay developers not to build them.
The settlement pays $928 million across two lease areas — $795 million for Attentive Energy off New York and New Jersey, and $133 million for Carolina Long Bay off North Carolina — eliminating 4 GW of planned capacity. The deal redirects TotalEnergies toward LNG development at the Rio Grande plant in Texas and conventional oil production in the Gulf. Public money is being used, simultaneously to remove zero-fuel-cost generation from the grid and to redirect a major clean energy developer toward a fossil fuel buildout instead.
And perhaps most catastrophic for the wind energy going forward is Total’s pledge not to develop offshore projects in the U.S. ever again. TotalEnergies is one of the largest energy companies in the world, with major offshore wind operations in Europe. When a company of that scale makes a public commitment, in front of the global energy industry, that the U.S. offshore wind market is not worth re-entering, it sends a signal to every other developer and financier watching.
Offshore wind requires ports, specialized vessels, manufacturing facilities, and a trained workforce, all of which need a visible long-term pipeline to justify investment. The U.S. was midway through building that supply chain when the moratorium landed. Today’s deal shrinks the remaining pipeline further, and does so with a permanent market exit that will not be easy to walk back under a future administration.
As Pouyanné put it, “Considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest, we have decided to renounce offshore wind development in the United States.”
The timing seems like it couldn’t be worse. American electricity bills rose 6.4% in 2025. The Iran war has. pushed global oil prices to their highest levels since 2022 and driven gasoline prices up nearly 80 cents a gallon in three weeks, costs that ripple through household budgets and across the economy more broadly. These are the direct consequence of the Strait of Hormuz disruption that the administration’s military action helped trigger.
Trump said in January, in front of oil executives at the White House, that his goal was to not let any windmill be built. Today, that goal has a price tag and a signed contract. Fourteen months in, the administration has eliminated or placed in lasting doubt more than 25 GW of planned capacity, killed the tax credits that made new projects financeable, and paid a French energy company nearly $1 billion to exit the American market permanently.
The energy emergency Trump declared on day one is real. The grid is under strain, demand is rising, ratepayers are paying more — and by trying to eliminate the cheapest and fastest generation available, the administration’s actions are making it worse.
