Trump halts construction on nearly complete wind farm off Rhode Island
thepublicsradio.org
thepublicsradio.org
Rhode Island sounds to me like the perfect candidate for 100% clean energy due to its size. It was a noble effort anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/24/trump-clean-...
Don't expect any of this to make sense.
He literally asked fossil fuel interests for a billion dollars and said they'd make more than that back because of his changes.
I don't know why we all have to pretend that this is some personal Quixotic quest of his rather than open corruption:
> But Mr. Trump told executives they were not fighting hard enough. He also went on a rant about windmills, the attendees said. Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that wind turbines cause cancer and that offshore wind farms are “driving whales crazy.”
> Mr. Trump did not request money in exchange for killing Mr. Biden’s climate regulations, the two people in the room maintained. Rather, the former president told executives that he was determined to squash what he considered anti-business policies, and that the oil industry should therefore want him to win and should raise $1 billion to ensure his success.
> He told the executives that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover a billion dollar contribution, the people said.
From the New York Times
Trump actually saying it out loud sure seems corrupt because in spirit, it is. It's just that the US SCOTUS decided corruption was just fine.
When you allow money in politics, politics becomes about money.
Isn't the problem of "currently calm and cloudy everywhere" far more likely for tiny state? Plus, being tiny makes it far easier for the lines on the map to randomly exclude fossil fuel power plants - even though you're conveniently connected to a large electrical grid, which still has plenty of those.
This is from a very different area, but you can see there's close to no 0 level downtime. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S29503604240000...
Vs. if you've viewing a bigger picture, and looking at graphs of the summed extractable wind energy across multiple, well-spread sites - far better.
Of course not. Just scream "national security!!" and you're allowed to do anything in this country. Trump did this with the tariffs as well.
I don't understand why the U.S. wouldn't want to be a leader in renewable energy and instead let China fill that role. Is it just stupidity + aversion to change?
FWIW, we now have quite a few off-short windfarms in the UK. Apart from the curiosity (can you count all those little specks on the horizon), they're so far from land that they make basically no noticeable difference to anyone, other than a sizeable input to the regional electricity supply. It's about the least intrusive form of energy production you can get, maybe one of the safest, among the easiest to decommission, and doesn't waste valuable real estate on land. We need more of them, not less.
Second part, only if it fits.
Offshore wind farms in the Cape Cod, Rhode Island and Long Island area have been a constant political football. Regardless of the pretext of any given action the the way things generally are is that the people who have a view they want to protect, the tourism industry and the hippie/nature/biology types are on the no-wind side and the climate types, green energy people, domestic energy and big business types are on the other. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes another side wins. But nobody ever gets a win streak long enough to bring anything to fruition.
Everyone circle jerking about whatever the political/ideological cause of the minute is is missing the broader trend. This has nothing to do with national security, or Trump, or anything else in the past few years other than that being the pretext for whatever action was taken at this time.
The area is well suited to wind power but the area but it's also chock full of rich people and moneyed interests that can afford to fight it, likely to the long term detriment of the region, but like locusts they will be gone and cashed out by then so they don't care. That's probably when these things will finally get built.
The potential for resource (energy) extraction here is undeniable. That's why various parts of this area have been suggested for wind farms for so long.
When the locusts have decimated the region and moved on and there is nobody left to fund the fight the resource extraction will happen. Because that's just the economically sensible thing to do. And without anyone to stand in the way sensible things tend to happen.
In a sort of perverse "you are why the history books have the horrors they do" sort of irony, Trump is very much a continuation of the broad social trend wherein people in the US have less rights and their governments have more arbitrary power as the years go on. To ascribe the problem to a particular politician, as bad as said politician may (or may not) be is to deny that trend, which is a stupid thing to do.
And just to be clear here, I am very much pro wind-farm and have been since before any of the current major political personalities were relevant.
"Shares in Ørsted plunged to a new record low on Monday after the Trump administration halted one of the Danish wind farm developer’s almost-completed projects in a move that shocked investors."
FT.com