President Donald Trump has always been crystal clear about his disdain for wind farms, but his second term’s landmark effort to halt new wind farm construction has now been undermined by five rulings from federal courts.
Trump has called wind farms “ugly” eyesores. He has said they are “driving the whales crazy” and that wind energy “kills the birds.” He has also falsely claimed that the noise emanating from windmills can cause cancer.
Clearly, Trump has had particular contempt for offshore wind—the variant that places turbines dozens of miles into open water—ostensibly since a failed legal challenge against a proposed offshore wind farm near his Scottish golf course a decade ago. His scorn culminated in a Department of the Interior announcement in December that it had paused leases for five multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms on national security grounds, arguing wind turbines could interfere with radar signals.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Ørsted, a Danish energy giant developing one of those projects off the coast of New York State, could resume construction. It marked the fifth time in the past three weeks a federal judge had ruled against the Trump administration in the case, and now all five of the wind farms planned in federal waters have gotten the go-ahead. While the legal battle has not yet concluded, it’s another loss for Trump in his war against wind energy, which continues to scale in the U.S. despite the president’s attacks.
