Assessing whether Donald Trump is winning his fight against wind power

For years, Donald Trump has made wind power a personal foil — a hostility said to date back to the sight of turbines near his Scottish golf course — and his objections have become a familiar part of his political playbook.

The president has long derided windmills, as he calls them, as “ugly,” “noisy” and “expensive,” while also insisting they are deadly to birds.

“Want to see a bird graveyard?” he said.

Wind turbines do kill birds, that much is true. But according to the American Bird Conservancy, the toll is far lower than the number killed by cars, cats and collisions with building glass.

Now his administration is turning that long-running rhetoric into policy.

Gone are the Biden-era tax breaks and investment incentives designed to accelerate America’s shift to cleaner energy.

In their place, under a new Trumpian push to “drill, baby, drill”, energy companies are being compensated to walk away from wind projects already under way and steer that money instead toward fossil fuels.

In one such “pay-not-to-play” arrangement, the government reimbursed French power company TotalEnergies for offshore wind farm leases worth $1 billion (€866m).

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the agreement “prioritises affordability for hardworking American consumers over the prior administration’s ideological, ineffective energy policies”.

The administration said the move would strengthen US national security and help bring down household energy bills.

French energy giant TotalEnergies agreed to abandon offshore wind project

As part of the agreement, TotalEnergies committed to redirecting the funds into oil and gas development.

“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, in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees,” said Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of TotalEnergies Patrick Pouyanné.

The federal government also moved to stop the Golden State Wind project off central California and Bluepoint Wind off the coast of New Jersey, again paying roughly $1 billion to the companies involved.

The response from Democratic politicians was immediate.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul pressed the White House for an explanation.

“When I heard this, I said one thing: I’m the governor of New York, if there is a national security threat off the coast of New York, you need to tell me what it is – I want a briefing right now,” she said.

“Well, lo and behold, they had no answer,” she said.

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven Democrat-run states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont — seeking to overturn the TotalEnergies deal.

“This administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” Ms James said in a statement.

Donald Trump has pursued an energy policy of ‘drill, baby, drill’

“We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

In California, the state Energy Commission opened an investigation into the decision to shelve the Golden State Wind project.

Michael Colvin, director of the state’s environmental defence fund energy programme, described it as a “wasteful deal” that would leave taxpayers footing the bill.

“As families face soaring bills driven by fossil fuel price spikes and as power demand from data centres, industry and homes keeps rising – we need to bring more reliable clean energy onto the grid with stable, predictable costs,” he said.

As in so many other policy fights under this administration, the clash over wind has largely shifted to the courts, where a growing stack of lawsuits is challenging the stop-work — or in this case stop-wind — orders.

Federal judges, for their part, have repeatedly blocked the administration’s attempts to halt five offshore projects along the East Coast.

“The administration has tried different legal approaches to stop these projects, and so far the courts have rejected each one,” said Hillary Bright of Turning Forward, an offshore wind campaign group.

“Federal judges have allowed all five projects that received stop work orders in December 2025 to continue construction, and three of those five are now delivering power to American homes and businesses,” she said.

Fuel prices continue to surge in the US

Still, the fight over wind does not break neatly along party lines.

In fact, much of America’s clean energy boom in recent years has unfolded in deeply conservative states.

Texas, better known in the public imagination for oil barons in ten-gallon hats, now stands as the nation’s clear leader in wind power, generating roughly one-third of US wind electricity.

Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas — all firmly rooted in Republican territory — also rank near the top.

And despite the headline-grabbing cancellation of offshore developments, several major onshore wind projects are still moving forward.

New Mexico, for instance, is preparing to switch on what will be the biggest wind farm in US history.

The SunZia wind project, with enough capacity to supply electricity to about three million people, is expected to begin operating in the coming week.

Indeed, wind is on pace for its strongest year in America since 2022, according to David Groarke of consultancy Indigo Advisory.

“Over eight gigawatts have been installed,” he told RTÉ News, as developers race to secure Biden-era tax credits before they expire.

“There’s an incentive to move quickly, and that’s why we’re having a record year,” he said.

But, he added, that momentum is unlikely to endure.

“The Trump administration and various other factors are hampering the growth of wind,” he said.

“Right now, wind is about 10% of US electricity, and it’s going to stay at that figure roughly through 2030,” he said.

The uncertainty hanging over the sector is likely to unsettle developers, whose investments are often planned years — sometimes decades — in advance.

With fierce opposition from Washington and legal battles unfolding across the country, the climate is hardly inviting for investors either.

A first-quarter report from industry body American Clean Power showed solar and battery growth holding steady, even as wind began to lose momentum.

“The pipeline for land-based wind has stagnated, and offshore wind has plummeted by 35%,” the report found.

“Early and-mid-stage land-based wind projects have struggled to secure approvals from federal regulators, and offshore wind continues to weather permitting roadblocks and uncertainty,” it said.

At a time of growing electricity demand on the grid — much of it driven by the rollout of data centres — the cost of freezing wind projects is likely to land with consumers, Ms Bright said.

China produces more than half of the world’s wind power

Even where courts have cleared projects to resume, she said, “the construction pause has cost developers millions of dollars and, along with Trump’s sustained attacks on renewable energies of all kinds, injected uncertainty and additional risk into future projects”.

“Such delays also mean additional costs for ratepayers,” she said.

On wind energy, the United States is now charting a course that stands apart from many other countries.

China has pushed aggressively into the sector and now accounts for more than half of global wind electricity capacity.

Brazil and India are also rapidly expanding their wind turbine installation.

Meanwhile, smaller countries such as Denmark and Ireland have raised wind’s share of electricity generation to 58% and 35% respectively.

“Other developed economies have consistent policy across administrations,” Mr Groarke said, “and that leads to a good marriage of economic incentives and certainty in the market, and the ability for developers to plan long range”.

That consistency is missing in the US.

Under this administration, fossil fuels are back in favour. On Thursday, the US President announced $700 million (€606m) in new federal funding for the coal industry. Two new coal plants are due to be built.

The turn marks a sharp departure from the priorities of the previous administration.

“What’s happening in the US is it’s primarily an economic argument that’s been made for energy, and there’s inconsistency at the federal policy level,” he said, “which means that the energy build out here is primarily being built on market forces”.

“Which is very American when you think of it,” he added.