Comment: Wind energy scores win in court, but long fight ahead
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, January 14, 2026
By Liam Denning / Bloomberg Opinion
On Revolution Wind, Trump fought the law and the law rolled its eyes.
The judgement rendered late Monday, allowing work to resume on a wind project offshore New England, made a mockery of President Donald Trump’s legal tactics. It portends further court setbacks for him. And yet, the saga itself constitutes a kind of win for the president.
Revolution Wind, a 704-megawatt joint venture between Orsted A/S and Global Infrastructure Partners LP, was almost 90 percent built when the Interior Department ordered it to stop work last August. After a court quickly parried that move, the administration played the drearily familiar trump card of national security. Last month, Revolution’s license, along with those of four other offshore wind projects under construction, was suspended on the grounds that a new Defense Department assessment had found that the “rapid evolution of relevant adversary technologies” meant the turbines posed a heightened security risk to the East Coast. Regrettably, the nature of that rapid evolution was classified.
The rapid evolution of Trump’s legal tactics was, on the other hand, plain to all, including the judge who lifted the initial stop-work order and then granted Revolution relief again this week. In doing so, he cited Interior’s inadequate explanation of the risks.
This is a major setback for Trump’s maximalist assault on these five projects. Interior may well appeal but this failure to successfully wave the magic wand of super-secret security stuff doesn’t bode well. “In our view, this was perhaps the best arrow in their quiver,” says Timothy Fox of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based analysis firm. The same judge is also hearing a similar case relating to Sunrise Wind, another Orsted project offshore Long Island, New York. Two other cases have hearings scheduled for this week and the state of New York filed two more against the Trump administration on Friday.
Trump’s longstanding and seemingly personal animus toward offshore wind power, as well as the tactical game being played with northeastern governors over natural gas pipelines, mean he will surely look for another vector of attack. Still, it is difficult to see what that might be at this point. All this should come as a relief to developers and those governors, who are counting on these projects to fill looming gaps in power supply.
And yet, for the sector as a whole, it remains a partial victory; a win for damage limitation. Recall that former President Joe Biden’s original target for offshore wind was 30 gigawatts by 2030. The five projects with suspended licenses add up to about 5.9 gigawatts. Bloomberg NEF now expects that amount, along with the miniscule amount of existing capacity in operation, to be the sum total of U.S. offshore wind capacity through 2040. It had previously projected 46 gigawatts deployed by then.
U.S. offshore wind’s unsubsidized cost of $199 per megawatt-hour, by BNEF’s estimate, makes it extraordinarily reliant on subsidies to reach a point where economies of scale in the supply chain kick in. Yet Republicans’ gutting of clean energy subsidies in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act meant that projects had to begin construction by the middle of this year in order to qualify before federal money disappeared. In the meantime, of course, Trump’s legal shenanigans made even that deadline more apparent than real.
“The actions demonstrate to his voters that he opposes offshore wind,” says Fox of Trump, adding that “developers and, importantly, financiers are likely to be wary.”
While Orsted’s shares rallied by 5.5 percent on Monday’s court win, that shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is down by more than 40 percent since Trump’s election victory, in part because it had to resort to a massive rights issue last summer to deal with the fallout of canceled and delayed offshore wind projects. It is notable that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected in Tuesday’s State of the State address to announce a target for 5 gigawatts of new nuclear power capacity,also not cheap, and definitely not quick, but with zero emissions and, rare for any form of energy in today’s US, broad bipartisan support.
That all this will exacerbate inflation-busting increases in electricity bills hardly seems to register with Trump. The loss in court may grate, but when the point is to cow your perceived opponents, the grinding, uncertain process itself is the win.
Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.
