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The Trump administration’s latest attack on an offshore wind project could make New England’s electricity less reliable and more expensive.
Late last month, the administration halted work on the nearly complete Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, citing dubious “national security” reasons. State governors, labor leaders, and even New England fishermen who voted for Donald Trump oppose the move, which is part of the president’s monthslong assault on an energy source central to the Northeast’s grid and decarbonization plans.
Should Trump tank the project, it would leave a gaping hole in New England’s energy mix, driving up the region’s already-high electricity prices and leaving its grid more vulnerable to collapse during winter storms. New England’s grid operator has already factored the 704-megawatt wind farm into its plans starting next year. Delaying delivery of that power “will increase risks to reliability,” ISO New England warned in a statement last week.
That’s not to mention the longer-term disruptions that could stem from killing a project that’s followed all the rules and is already about 80% built.
“Unpredictable risks and threats to resources—regardless of technology—that have made significant capital investments, secured necessary permits, and are close to completion will stifle future investments, increase costs to consumers, and undermine the power grid’s reliability and the region’s economy now and in the future,” ISO New England said in the statement.
In the measured world of grid operators, warnings like these are “unprecedented,” said Abe Silverman, an attorney, energy consultant, and research scholar at Johns Hopkins University. But so is the threat of the federal government smashing a cornerstone of a region’s energy mix, he said.
“We’re talking about a really significant hit to consumers, at a time we’re all hyper-concerned about inflation and energy prices generally,” Silverman said. Losing Revolution Wind’s electricity could cost New England consumers about $500 million a year, he estimated, based on the value the project has secured in ISO New England’s forward capacity market and its potential to supplant costlier power plants used during grid emergencies.
And “we don’t need a bunch of fancy studies to tell us that these units are needed for reliability,” he said. New England has long struggled to meet electricity demand during winter cold snaps and summer heat waves. When temperatures surpassed 100 degrees Fahrenheit for several days in June, “they had every single generator on,” he said. “Here we have a unit that should be operating as of next summer that is now in doubt.”
But it’s during the winter months that the loss of Revolution Wind could be most keenly felt, said Susan Muller, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. That’s when the region’s limited supply of fossil gas is stretched even thinner, since the fuel is used both for building heating and power generation. ISO New England is banking on offshore wind — which blows most strongly in the winter — to meet energy needs as temperatures plummet.
But as the move to shut down Revolution Wind shows, the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the offshore wind industry are making the energy source harder to plan around.
In the winter, “we essentially run out of pipeline gas” for the gas-fired power plants that make up New England’s largest single source of power, Muller said. The region is forced to rely on power plants fueled by oil and costly liquefied natural gas to cover the gap.
That’s an expensive way to keep the lights on. Wholesale power costs from December to February spiked to $4 billion, up from $1.6 billion the previous winter, according to ISO New England data, largely driven by increasing gas costs and a bump in coal- and oil-fired generation. ISO New England reported that total energy costs this spring rose 67% compared to last year, driven primarily by a 112% year-over-year increase in gas prices.
Luckily, strong winter winds make offshore wind farms a great solution to these problems, Muller said — and she has the fancy studies to prove it.
Muller consulted on a new report from Daymark Energy Advisors that found New England could have saved $400 million in energy costs this past winter if 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity had been online. That’s roughly the total combined capacity of Revolution, the in-progress Vineyard Wind, and two other yet-to-be-built projects, New England Wind 1 and the first phase of the SouthCoast Wind project.
A similar analysis Muller worked on last year found that Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind would have slashed blackout risk had they been available in recent decades. Vineyard Wind is already sending power to the grid from 17 of its 62 turbines, and the entire project is expected to be complete by year’s end.
The money-saving mechanism is pretty simple, Muller explained. Offshore wind farms are costly to build, and the utilities in Connecticut and Rhode Island that signed long-term contracts with Revolution Wind will be paying prices for that power that are higher than the average prices on ISO New England’s wholesale energy market. But the price is steady and not susceptible to huge swings like that of fossil gas. During wintertime peaks, it costs the same to generate power from offshore wind as it does on a mild day — the same is not true for gas.
Because of this dynamic, the Daymark Energy Advisors analysis found that Revolution Wind’s power would still save consumers money even if the utilities pay twice as much as wholesale prices, Muller said.
Revolution Wind is also meant to supply power to ISO New England’s forward capacity market, which is designed to secure the resources the region needs to ensure its grid can keep running during times of peak demand in future years.
The project would make it less expensive for the region to meet those peaks, Silverman said, putting New England in a better position than other areas of the country. Grid operator PJM Interconnection, which covers 13 states and D.C., has seen capacity prices skyrocket in the past year because it has not built new generation fast enough, he noted.
Perhaps even more valuable is that offshore wind can be a buffer against fuel shortages, Muller said. “In other words, we might have enough power plants, but they might not have enough fuel to get us through,” she said.
This summer, ISO New England unveiled the initial findings of an assessment on the grid’s ability to deliver energy during extreme weather events. That’s an incredibly complicated evaluation with a lot of variables, ranging from the future of large-scale transmission lines that can deliver more power from outside the region to the capacity of the Everett Marine Terminal, a major LNG import and storage facility near Boston.
But out of all those variables, the study’s base case assumes that ISO New England will have about 1.6 gigawatts of offshore wind power in 2027, including 704 megawatts from Revolution Wind. “If you take it out of the model, the risk will go up,” Muller said.
Fossil fuels can’t replace the power that would be lost if Revolution Wind isn’t brought online, Muller and Silverman said — even if the Trump administration is touting more gas pipelines as a solution.
Last month, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin published an op-ed in The Boston Globe claiming that a proposed pipeline originating in Pennsylvania would bring down energy costs in New England by enabling the region to access more gas from the line’s terminus in New York.
The piece came after the Trump administration lifted a stop-work order on New York’s Empire Wind offshore wind project in May, claiming it had struck a deal with Gov. Kathy Hochul to allow two major gas pipelines to be built in the state. Hochul, a Democrat, has denied any quid pro quo but has said the state will “work with the administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements under New York law.”
Energy experts have pointed out many flaws in the administration’s push for more pipelines, including a lack of capacity to move gas from New York to New England and poor long-term economics for expanding that capacity. Every state in New England except New Hampshire has set clean energy and decarbonization mandates that call for using less fossil gas, not more, in the years to come.
“We know that pipelines cost billions of dollars to build,” Muller said. But while Revolution Wind will generate energy throughout the year, “a pipeline would only change things for a handful of days, a few weeks of the year. The rest of the time, it wouldn’t be needed. … There would be cheaper options.”
The Trump administration has insisted that fossil-fueled power plants must stay open to ensure grid reliability, going so far as to use emergency powers to force coal-, gas-, and oil-burning plants to keep running past their planned retirements. Those orders will force customers to bear tens of millions of dollars or more in unnecessary costs while doing nothing to improve reliability, according to energy analysts as well as the state attorneys general and environmental groups challenging the extensions in court.
Fossil-fueled power plants also pose reliability challenges in cold weather. Gas plants made up the majority of generator failures during widespread winter blackouts in Texas in 2021, across the U.S. Southeast in 2022, and during the 2014 “polar vortex” in the U.S. Northeast.
The cold can cause malfunctions at gas plants themselves, or it can limit fuel supply by spurring breakdowns at the wellheads and compression stations that feed pipeline networks. ISO New England’s most recent winter outlook assumed that 3.9 gigawatts to 4.8 gigawatts of gas-fired power “may be at risk due to constrained natural gas pipelines.”
All of these factors were considered in the years-long decision-making processes that New England states went through to decide that offshore wind is their best choice, said Larry Chretien, executive director of the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
“We’re buying 30 years of power at a fixed price, and it’s a good price,” he said. “The states have decided they want to buy this stuff.” By blocking completion of Revolution Wind, the Trump administration is “forcing fossil fuels down our throats.”
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