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President Donald Trump has made it his mission to banish offshore wind farms from America. He has derided wind energy as unreliable and expensive while freezing permitting and halting projects already under construction.
Yet a new report suggests that the president’s moves could be working against grid reliability in key parts of the country. Along the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, offshore wind can play a critical role in keeping the lights on year-round, especially through the winter, according to a study published this month by New York City–based consultancy Charles River Associates.
Trump’s attacks on offshore wind and other renewable sectors come amid dire challenges for the nation’s power system. The world’s wealthiest companies are building power-hungry data centers as grid infrastructure ages and households’ energy bills skyrocket. The White House itself has declared an “energy emergency,” which it’s using to push for more fossil-gas, coal, and nuclear power plants.
But offshore wind is well suited to “meeting the moment,” in part because gas plants are reliable in the summer but can buckle under winter weather, according to the study. Ocean winds in the Northeast are at their strongest and steadiest in winter months, making turbines there a way to boost the reliability of power grids connected to underperforming gas plants.
Oliver Stover, a coauthor of the study, called offshore wind farms a “near-term solution,” saying that turbines at sea and gas plants on land complement each other throughout the Northeast’s changing seasons: “They’re stronger together.”
Stover explained that if grid reliability is the goal, it makes sense for planned offshore wind farms to reach completion. Those projects will help regional grids burdened by extreme winter weather and data-center demands “buy time” as more infrastructure is built.
“Every megawatt is a good megawatt,” he said.
The periods in which offshore wind performs best also align with the time of increasing grid strain: winter mornings and evenings, when people tend to crank up the heat. While peak electricity demand has historically happened during the summer months, it is shifting to these winter moments in many parts of the country, largely due to the mass electrification of space-heating systems.
That means securing power generation during colder months must be, according to Stover, “a priority going forward.”
Stover and his colleagues aren’t the first to underscore the reliability benefits of offshore wind. Other analysts, along with grid operators, have warned that Trump’s efforts to squash certain projects that East Coast states were planning to rely on could raise blackout risks and power bills in the region.
Take Revolution Wind: Trump paused construction of the Rhode Island project in August due to “national security concerns” that a federal judge said were not rooted in “factual findings.” Having won an injunction in court, developer Ørsted eventually resumed construction one month later.
But during the pause and amid mounting uncertainty over the project’s fate, ISO New England — the region’s grid operator — released a statement saying that delaying delivery of power from Revolution Wind “will increase risks to reliability.”
Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Canary Media that if Revolution Wind were killed, the impact would be most acutely felt in winter months. That’s when the region’s limited supply of fossil gas is stretched even thinner, since the fuel is used for both building heating and power generation.
Losing Revolution Wind’s electricity entirely would have cost New England consumers about $500 million a year, according to Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins University. His estimation was based on the value that the offshore project had secured in ISO New England’s forward capacity market as well as its potential to supplant costlier power plants used during grid emergencies, like snowstorms.
“We don’t need a bunch of fancy studies to tell us that these units are needed for reliability,” Silverman told Canary Media in September during Revolution Wind’s government-ordered pause.
In Virginia, the world’s data-center capital, America’s largest offshore wind farm is slated to start generating power in March 2026. Trump has not yet targeted the 2.6-gigawatt project, but if it doesn’t come online as planned, the mid-Atlantic grid region run by PJM Interconnection would be less reliable and have higher electricity costs, this month’s study says.
In a large swath of the Mid-Atlantic region, offshore wind has one of the highest “resource-adequacy” scores among energy types, according to the study. In other words, when it comes to lowering the probability of blackouts there, offshore wind outcompetes all other types of renewable energy — and is even on par with the most efficient gas-fired power plants.
But the sector is not without its issues, Stover emphasized. Even before Trump’s anti-wind policies made investors skittish and permits no longer guaranteed, construction costs had been ballooning for years, given supply chain issues and inflation.
Offshore wind farms are also, by nature, megaprojects that come with inherent logistical hurdles. Just last month, New York’s Empire Wind lost the turbine-construction vessel it was banking on, due to a skirmish between two shipbuilding companies. Only a handful of boats in the world are capable of doing that kind of work.
The report’s conclusions stand in stark contrast to rhetoric coming from top officials implementing Trump’s war on offshore wind. The sector was just taking off in the U.S. when the president was inaugurated in January, with the first commercial-scale project coming online last year and five more arrays now under construction.
“Under this administration, there is not a future for offshore wind because it is too expensive and not reliable enough,” Doug Burgum, secretary of the Interior Department, told an audience in September at a fossil-gas industry conference in Italy.
Burgum’s statements mirror some of Trump’s favorite talking points that have long misled the public about the risks of wind power. In September, Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in a speech that “windmills are so pathetic and bad” because of their unreliability, falsely claiming that wind power is “the most expensive energy ever conceived.”
The grid does not automatically face problems when “the wind doesn’t blow,” as Trump falsely claimed at the United Nations. Grid operators routinely handle the intermittent nature of power generation from multiple sources — whether it be solar, gas, or wind turbines — through grid-management techniques and, increasingly, battery storage.
Trump is wrong about costs, too.
While offshore wind energy is currently expensive, nuclear energy — a sector the Trump administration aims to boost — is typically the most expensive type of power.
Globally, power generated from wind turbines in the ocean is comparable to other sectors such as geothermal and coal when it comes to cost-competitiveness. In fact, offshore wind has become more cost-competitive relative to other power types in recent years as the sector has matured in Europe and China, according to the most recent analysis by financial advisory firm Lazard.
But when temperatures plummet, offshore wind power could be a huge cost-saver for many U.S. residents. One analysis found that in New England, if 3.5 gigawatts’ worth of under-construction offshore wind farms had been online, households there could have saved $400 million on power bills last winter. In the coming months, cost savings and reliability will take center stage as Vineyard Wind, the region’s first large-scale offshore wind farm to break ground, feeds the grid for its first full winter season.
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