Trump Administration Restores Sanity to Offshore Energy Policy – Watts Up With That?

Charles Rotter

The Trump administration’s move to rescind all designated Offshore Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) in the United States is being characterized as a “major policy reversal,” but what it truly represents is a refreshing application of rationality in a field too long dominated by dogma, groupthink, and the wishful economics of green technocracy.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the decision to rescind every single federally designated wind energy area on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which brings to an end the federal protection of more than 3.5 million acres previously targeted for “offshore wind development.” The scale of the reversal cannot be overstated: this is not a minor adjustment or a routine regulatory tweak. This is, in the words of the article, the effective “end” of offshore wind leasing in the United States—at least for the time being.

To understand the gravity and necessity of this move, let’s remind ourselves how we got here. The Obama and Biden administrations, along with their European counterparts, threw unprecedented support behind offshore wind, an industry that—despite the tidal wave of public subsidies—has shown a knack for floundering economically and technologically whenever taxpayer money is not propping it up. In fact, the very need for designated wind energy areas is itself an admission that offshore wind cannot compete on a level playing field; it requires the full faith, credit, and political muscle of government to exist.

BOEM’s action follows the Interior Secretary’s Order 3437—titled, with unintentional irony, “Ending Preferential Treatment for Unreliable, Foreign Controlled Energy Sources in Department Decision-Making”—a move that aligns with a Presidential Memorandum from January 2025. That memorandum, let’s recall, ordered the temporary suspension of offshore wind leasing, setting the stage for this more comprehensive rollback.

What, then, are the practical consequences of this move? According to the article, the decision directly impacts 11 previously designated WEAs across a wide array of U.S. regions, from the Gulf of Maine to North Carolina, Oregon, the California coast, Texas, and Louisiana. The magnitude of this reversal would make even the most entrenched central planners do a double-take. Whole tracts of ocean, covering approximately 3.5 million acres, have been yanked from beneath the feet of offshore wind developers—developers who, by the way, have relied on the predictable largesse of federal policy for their very existence.

One can almost hear the shrieks of indignation from the wind lobby and their media allies. For years, the American public has been told that offshore wind is the future—a future of clean energy jobs, revitalized industrial towns, and limitless, free power blowing in from the sea. This vision, repeated with religious fervor, has always required the public to suspend disbelief about the basic laws of physics, economics, and environmental impact.

The Trump administration, by contrast, is taking the radical step of recognizing reality. Offshore wind, despite decades of hype, remains expensive, unreliable, and—most tellingly—foreign controlled. As the Interior Secretary’s order states, there is no good reason to give “preferential treatment” to energy sources that cannot exist without continuous political and financial life support, especially when they are so often controlled by foreign interests.

Let’s take a moment to examine the rationale behind offshore wind and why its collapse, far from being a national tragedy, may be a cause for cautious celebration. Offshore wind projects are routinely billed as environmentally virtuous, but the facts remain stubbornly at odds with the sales pitch. Wind turbines at sea are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and notoriously unreliable. Their lifespans are short, and their capacity factors—meaning, the actual electricity they produce relative to their rated capacity—are consistently oversold. They require fleets of backup gas or coal plants for when the wind, inconveniently, does not blow.

And then there’s the matter of subsidies. Wind energy, and offshore wind in particular, is perhaps the most subsidized sector of the energy industry in American history. According to analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wind receives subsidies per megawatt-hour that far exceed those for oil, gas, or even solar. And these subsidies are not just small change. Billions of dollars have been poured into wind energy—money that might otherwise have been used to repair roads, fund schools, or lower the cost of living for ordinary Americans.

Not to be outdone by economic absurdity, offshore wind has managed to rack up a questionable environmental record as well. Offshore turbine installation can disrupt marine life, interfere with shipping, and has even raised concerns about impacts on whale populations. But these legitimate ecological worries have been swept under the rug by those for whom the mere invocation of “green energy” is enough to sanctify any project.

In this context, the decision to halt all offshore wind leasing is a refreshing case of government finally—finally—questioning the wisdom of shoveling public money and political capital into a bottomless pit. There’s a reason, after all, that the market has not produced a competitive offshore wind sector without government intervention. The inherent costs and uncertainties are simply too high.

If anything, the move exposes the fragility of the “clean energy transition.” If something as supposedly vital as offshore wind can be undone by a single policy shift, it suggests that its foundations are not made of concrete but of sand—held together by politics and little else.

And let’s not kid ourselves about who benefits from wind energy’s continued subsidization. While the public is told it’s about saving the planet, the real beneficiaries have always been the developers, construction firms, and politically connected intermediaries who extract rents from a system designed to reward cronyism over results.

The ultimate lesson here is not just about wind energy. It’s about the perils of technocratic overreach, the arrogance of central planning, and the wisdom of letting markets—not government decrees—determine which energy sources are truly viable. The Trump administration’s reversal will no doubt be condemned by those for whom “green energy” is an article of faith. But for anyone still possessed of a functioning sense of proportion and a respect for reality, the move stands as a long-overdue course correction.

The final word belongs to the ordinary American, who has been forced for too long to foot the bill for utopian experiments that do little but enrich the few at the expense of the many. Perhaps, with this policy shift, we will begin to see a return to energy policy that puts reliability, affordability, and national interest first—not the dreams of central planners and the fantasies of the climate-industrial complex.

And if the wind doesn’t blow quite so favorably for offshore wind’s rent-seekers in the future, well, maybe that’s just the way the wind ought to blow.

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