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On June 30, after an exhausting round of late-night negotiations, Delaware state legislators passed a bill to effectively green-light the Southeast’s second offshore wind farm. Within days, lawmakers in Washington passed legislation that may doom its future.
MarWin, the first phase of a 114-turbine project off the Delmarva Peninsula, is slated for installation in 2028 with onshore construction possibly starting next year, but that timeline is perhaps unrealistic, said Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst with BloombergNEF. MarWin doesn’t have its financing in place yet to underwrite construction and, to make matters worse, Congress just unleashed a crushing new deadline.
When President Donald Trump signed the “Big, Beautiful Bill” on Friday, he dramatically shortened the window in which offshore wind projects can qualify for tax credits that offset up to 30% of their costs. The law now requires new wind farms be “placed in service” by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify.
“We don’t predict any new offshore wind projects starting construction … at least in the next four years,” Sholler told Canary Media two days before Congress passed the bill.
He described Republicans’ tightening of the tax credit — from an original deadline to start construction by 2033 or potentially later, to this one-year sprint — as the final nail in the coffin for offshore wind farms that are fully approved but not currently underway. Two projects — MarWin near Maryland and New England Wind off the Massachusetts coastline — float in this gray zone, and are now vulnerable to being put on ice indefinitely.
Wind developers have faced mounting hurdles in recent months: new tariffs, a federal permitting pause, higher investment risk, and the looming threat of the Trump administration halting already-approved projects, like it did in a shocking monthlong pause on New York’s Empire Wind.
A BloombergNEF report released in April states that losing the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, known as 45Y and 48E, would be “devastating” for U.S. projects already in the pipeline. Analysts estimate that the electricity produced by offshore wind farms that qualify for the credits costs on average 24% less over a project’s lifetime.
That April report predicted “all but the most advanced projects [will] pause development activities.” Now, with tax credits officially rolled back, prospects for offshore wind appear even more dim.
“If you take away the tax credits, it doesn’t make much sense to develop an entirely new sector,” said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College who studies offshore wind policy.
America’s offshore wind sector is still in its infancy. While the U.K. has already built over 50 wind farms in its waters, America has only completed one large-scale project: South Fork Wind, located off the coast of Long Island, New York.
Trump issued an executive order on Inauguration Day that froze all offshore wind permitting and leasing pending a federal review. Seemingly safe from the president’s ire at the time were eight projects, including MarWin, that already had all their federal permits in hand. Since then, at least one of those permitted projects — the 2.8-gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey coast — has fallen apart. Five are currently under construction.
The largest offshore wind project now being built in America — Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt Virginia project — appears unscathed by the Inflation Reduction Act rollback.
“There is no impact to Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. The project is nearly 60 percent complete and is on schedule to be completed in late 2026,” wrote Jeremy Slayton, a spokesperson for Dominion Energy, in an email to Canary Media, dispelling concerns that the 176-turbine project off the Virginia coastline would suffer from the scaleback of tax credit eligibility.
The existing tax credits Dominion expects to secure “will result in substantial savings for our customers,” he added.
Dominion has so far spent approximately $6 billion on this monumental project. Some in the industry feared that the impact of Trump’s reconciliation bill could have been far worse, and are celebrating that the five wind farms under construction might see full operation.
“While this fight is over, I’m incredibly proud of Oceantic’s members and staff,” said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of the offshore wind industry group, in a July 3 statement after Congress passed the bill. “Because of their relentless push, developers now have one year to start construction and retain 100% of their tax credits, with a simple ‘safe harbor’ option.” (On Monday, Trump issued an executive order that tries to further limit the bill’s “safe harbor” and “beginning of construction” options.)
But for Maryland and Delaware state lawmakers who backed MarWin in the face of considerable county-level pushback in recent months, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a major blow. The project’s turbines were slated for installation off Maryland’s coastline but its cables would come ashore in Delaware, making it a much-anticipated joint investment.
On June 30, Delaware’s Democratic lawmakers passed a bill that strips Sussex County officials of their ability to revoke local permits for certain aspects of the wind project. A county-level block on an onshore substation was MarWin’s final hurdle and clearing it meant construction on the substation could, in theory, begin as early as February of next year.
“This bill helps eliminate unlawful and unnecessary hurdles to a project that will help ensure electric reliability for Delawareans while lowering the price they pay for electricity,” Nancy Sopko, a spokesperson for MarWin developer US Wind, told Canary Media via email.
But whether US Wind can lock in financing and officially break ground by July 2026 — the new deadline for tax credit eligibility — is another story. US Wind is suing the Sussex County Council over the permit denial in hopes of starting earlier, before the new state law goes into effect.
Before signing the final bill, Delaware’s Gov. Matt Meyer (D) said it is important to get the offshore wind energy project “done quickly and safely to provide sustainable power to Delaware.” Within days, however, MarWin had potentially been rendered incapable — at least in the view of analysts — of taking advantage of the tax credits that would make its construction financially possible.
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