Admin tries to sink Maryland’s first offshore wind project

Maryland’s first offshore wind farm could have broken ground next year. But now the 114-turbine renewable energy project is all but doomed following the Trump administration’s most recent move in a long line of attacks on the industry.

In a motion filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Interior Department asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was authorized in the final weeks of the Biden administration. The wind farm was expected to power over 718,000 homes in a Democrat-led state facing rocketing energy demands.

Officials claim that the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made an ​“error” when assessing the turbines’ potential impact on other activities — like search-and-rescue operations and fishing — within the 80,000-acre swath of ocean where the wind farm would be located.

The project is over a decade in the making, with developer US Wind purchasing the lease in 2014. But after President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July and greatly shortened the duration of the wind energy tax credit, Maryland’s first offshore wind farm already seemed impossible to pull off — at least economically.

Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst with BloombergNEF, told Canary Media in July that with the tax credits sunsetting at a much earlier date, the Maryland project would likely no longer be able to offset 30% of its costs. The original rule for receiving the incentives required construction to start by 2033 or potentially even later, but the new law stipulates that wind farms must be ​“placed in service” by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify.

Onshore construction is not supposed to start until next year at the earliest, and at-sea installation not until 2028, so the new deadline for receiving tax credits was crushing. Also, US Wind doesn’t have its financing in place yet to underwrite construction, according to Sholler. Securing financing without those credits guaranteed is a hard sell.

Analysts saw the tightening of the tax credit’s timeframe down to this one-year sprint as the final nail in the coffin for offshore wind farms that were fully approved but not currently underway.

Two projects — MarWin, the first phase of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, and New England Wind off the Massachusetts coastline — exist in that gray zone. If the judge yanks its approval, MarWin will almost certainly be mothballed for the rest of Trump’s tenure.

Four offshore wind farms are currently being built in America’s waters. A fifth project, Revolution Wind, is 80% complete, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum abruptly paused its construction in August, citing ​“national security” concerns. Project developer Ørsted is challenging the federal freeze in court. That saga is part of an escalating war on wind power led by the White House that has thrown the industry into chaos in recent weeks.

US Wind is a joint venture of the Italian corporate giant Toto Holding and Apollo Global Management, an investment firm. A spokesperson for the company said it will fight to maintain its approvals.

“After many years of analysis, several federal agencies issued final permits to the project,” spokesperson Nancy Sopko said in a public statement released Friday. ​“We intend to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”