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US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at a press conference on 10 September that offshore wind has no future in the US under the Trump administration and that the government was reviewing five offshore wind projects that are now under construction.
Speaking to the press at the Gastech event in Milan, Italy, Burgum said offshore wind was “ too expensive and not reliable enough” .
“Many of those projects weren’t really about electricity, they were about tax subsidies” , said Doug Burgum .
“I think the fact that the subsidies have been either cut back or limited means that it is likely that there will not be future offshore wind built in America.”
Burgum added that there is also opposition to offshore wind due to concerns about the whale population, as well as concerns from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about interference with radar systems.
“A lot of these offshore wind projects were moved [through] a very fast, ideologically driven permitting process. We’ve been asked as part of an executive order from the president to take a whole-of-government approach to review those”, the US Interior Secretary said.
The US government is currently “taking a deep look” into five offshore wind projects that are under construction, Burgum said, without naming the projects.
The latest project that got a stop-work order from the Department of the Interior (DOI) is Revolution Wind, an almost completed offshore wind farm owned by a 50/50 joint venture between Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables.