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A little over two years ago, my home state of Connecticut got some bad news. Park City Wind — an offshore wind project from Avangrid promising to provide the equivalent of 14% of the state’s electricity supply, $890 million in direct economic development, improved grid reliability during the winter and the opportunity to slash over 25 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions — was canceled. And not in the “tweeted something unsavory as a teenager” way.
Knowing I’d be losing some future relief on electric bills and a major climate solution in my backyard (well, my current apartment is on the water, so I think that counts?), I wanted to find out what went wrong. I failed to reach anyone directly involved, but wrote an article for WSHU interviewing a few experts including my state representative who chairs Connecticut’s House Select Committee on Sustainable & Renewable Energy.
Fast forward to today, and many have declared offshore wind “dead” in the United States, possibly permanently. It seemed to be the story of 2025, as the Trump administration issued stop work orders, revoked permits, clawed back funding, and just before the Christmas holiday, imposed another 90-day delay on five projects over “national security” concerns, despite the military already having evaluated and approved all of the projects. It wasn’t just the president that got attention for opposing offshore wind — media pundits, political organizers, and even local environmental groups made headlines in a year that saw the industry seemingly grind to a halt.
I agree that offshore wind was the story of 2025 for U.S. climate solutions. China has 177 operational offshore wind farms, the UK has 45, and Germany has 32. The United States, meanwhile, has 3.
But I would push back on the idea that a few actors — even in Washington — hold all the power over the offshore wind industry’s fate. I watched Park City Wind collapse under lawmakers who strongly supported the project, and in 2025, every other American clean energy sector saw tremendous growth despite federal opposition. That’s why I believe the bigger issue for offshore wind is its unique regulatory environment, which creates an inordinate amount of added costs for developers and pathways for opponents to delay and dismantle projects. As long as it’s playing by different rules, offshore wind won’t get a fair shake.
If a future administration wants to revive offshore wind to address climate change and bring down energy prices, they’ll need a lot more than a supportive status quo. Offshore wind will only become competitive and resilient if lawmakers start by reforming permitting laws, maritime shipping restrictions, and any other regulations standing in offshore wind’s way.
This past December, I was particularly intrigued by two Canary Media articles. The first profiled David Stevenson, a 75-year-old Delaware policy operator at the Caesar Rodney Institute, with the title “The man behind the fall of offshore wind.” Stevenson undoubtedly cares about climate change: he drives a hybrid, designed his home with solar panels, helped co-found the Delaware Green Building Council, and earlier worked at DuPont on coatings used in early solar panels and wind turbine blades. But in 2017, Stevenson grew concerned by the proposed Skipjack offshore wind project off Delaware, which he worried was too costly and would disrupt the coastline view. So he built a local opposition group called “Save Our Beach View,” organizing town halls and public-comment pressure, and running a direct-mail and social media campaign that sent tens of thousands of letters to officials. He then scaled that playbook beyond Delaware by connecting and professionalizing a network of coastal opposition groups, helping newer groups incorporate as nonprofits, convening recurring cross-state calls to share tactics, and launching a broader umbrella effort (the American Coalition for Ocean Protection) that tied local fights together. As the movement grew, he became a central node linking activists with political operatives and legal strategies, including elevating the claim that offshore wind kills whales despite no evidence to support it, and later urging the Interior Department to issue stop-work orders and revisit federal approvals for projects already under construction. A January 2025 study from Brown University named Stevenson as the center of the movement that killed offshore wind.
The second detailed many of the federal actions that dismantled offshore wind, which cumulatively cost America 33 gigawatts of anticipated electric capacity by 2035 and tens of thousands of jobs. In early 2025, President Trump signed a Day One executive order freezing permitting for new projects and ordering reviews that put already approved projects under a cloud. Within days, New Jersey’s Atlantic Shores wind farm began unraveling as Shell pulled out, the state backed away from buying its power, and the EPA later revoked a Clean Air Act permit. Over the spring and summer, a fully permitted floating-wind array in Maine was defunded, leading to layoffs and the project being stalled. In September, the Transportation Department withdrew $679 million for infrastructure projects tied to offshore wind, including port work meant to support the industry. Meanwhile, projects already underway were also hit with stop-and-go uncertainty, including Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, which was described as about 80% complete when it was paused earlier in the year. A federal court eventually struck down the Day One executive order on December 9, and the administration followed up last week with a new pause on all five offshore wind farms under construction, citing unspecified national security risks.
Both stories are excellent, and display how offshore wind is a far more nuanced debate than “left versus right” or “environmentalists versus climate deniers.” The first piece explained that Stevenson is all for solar and nuclear, and his claim that offshore wind kills whales has resonated from Fox News to local environmental groups. The second piece interviewed fishermen, engineers, and other citizens who voted for Trump and identify as conservative, but had looked forward to the jobs, revitalized ports, and other benefits that offshore wind would bring their communities and now felt betrayed. As someone who loves speaking to people with all political perspectives about climate solutions, I feel offshore wind offers win-win opportunities that should build common ground across party lines. It’s regrettable that sometimes the reverse happens instead.
But did David Stevenson, or Donald Trump, or any other one person or group actually kill offshore wind alone? The federal government opposed all renewable energy sources, but despite making plenty of headlines, clean energy actually had a great year in 2025. Solar, wind, and battery storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the U.S. electric grid this year through November. Batteries in particular had record growth in 2025, with a 43% increase in capacity from 2024. March 2025 also marked the first time that clean energy (including solar, hydropower, nuclear, and biofuels) covered over half of America’s electric power demand for an entire month. The industry no doubt faced challenges as the government froze permits and slashed grants, but for now, offshore wind is the only sector whose progress actually reversed.
What made offshore wind so especially easy to target? For one, offshore wind companies have to navigate an extremely complex array of permits which takes several years to get approved, costs millions of dollars to complete, and doesn’t actually build a single turbine. I talked about permitting in the abstract last month, but with offshore wind, the issue is far greater than other renewables. Many solar and onshore wind projects are not on federal lands meaning many federal reviews don’t apply, and even ones that are on federal land avoid the laws specific to marine and coastal management.
The permitting process
In an effort to express just how extreme this problem is, I’ve decided to walk you through the process for Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind — one of the five under-construction projects stalled last month by the Trump administration for “national security concerns,” which is slated to power up to 660,000 homes in a region with the highest concentration of data centers in the world. My challenge to you is to actually read this. It’s incredibly boring. And that’s precisely why we’re not focused the slightest bit on it. Rest assured, these projects are categorized by the federal government as FAST-41 projects, which means they should be undergoing some sort of coordinated and streamlined permitting process. So let’s dive into the “fast” version of infrastructure permitting.
Managed by Dominion Energy, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind’s federal gauntlet began when the developer submitted its Construction and Operations Plan to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on December 17, 2020. The agency deemed the application complete on June 17, 2021 (a 6-month intake period), and later issued its final Construction and Operations Plan decision on January 28, 2024 (a total of 3 years, 1 month, and 11 days from initial submission, about four months behind schedule).
The project then ran through multiple parallel federal reviews and permits. The historic and cultural resources consultation under the National Historic Preservation Act, led by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in coordination with preservation and tribal partners, was initiated on June 29, 2021 and concluded on October 27, 2023 (lasting 2 years, 3 months, and 28 days).
The environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, also led by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management through an Environmental Impact Statement, began on July 2, 2021. The agency completed scoping — which considers what questions the Environmental Impact Statement should answer and opens public comment — by July 19, 2021 (within 17 days), then published the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on December 16, 2022 (about four and a half months behind schedule, and 1 year, 5 months, and 14 days after the review began), and then published the Final Environmental Impact Statement on September 29, 2023 (about five months behind schedule, 9 months and 13 days after the draft, and 2 years, 2 months, and 27 days after the review began).
For air emissions, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency processed an Outer Continental Shelf air permit. A notice of intent to apply was filed on December 1, 2021, the application was submitted on March 15, 2022 (about seven months behind schedule), the application was determined complete on February 7, 2023 (about six months behind schedule, and 10 months and 23 days after submission), and final approval was issued on April 9, 2024 (about eight months behind schedule, and 2 years and 25 days after the application was submitted).
For marine wildlife, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries handled the Marine Mammal Protection Act review. The permit application was submitted on February 16, 2022, determined complete on August 12, 2022 (about four months behind schedule, and 5 months and 27 days after submission), and the decision was issued on February 1, 2024 (about ten months behind schedule, and 1 year, 11 months, and 16 days after the application was submitted).
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ran several separate authorization tracks. Its permission process for projects that may affect existing federally built water-resources infrastructure began with an initial application on May 17, 2022, followed by a complete application on July 15, 2022 (after 1 month and 28 days), a completeness determination on August 1, 2022 (after 17 days), and a decision on January 25, 2024 (about five months behind schedule, and 1 year, 8 months, and 8 days after the initial application). Separately, the Corps’ combined permit review under the Rivers and Harbors Act and the Clean Water Act started when a pre-construction notification was received on May 17, 2022, was completed on August 31, 2022 (3 months and 14 days later), moved to a published public notice on September 15, 2022, and reached final verification on January 25, 2024 (about five months behind schedule, and 1 year, 8 months, and 8 days after the initial notification). The Corps also issued a Department of the Army authorization and certification, with the application received on July 1, 2022, the completed application received on September 15, 2022 (2 months and 14 days later), and approval issued on April 26, 2023 (a total of 9 months and 25 days from initial receipt).
Two separate endangered-species reviews added still more clocks. One Endangered Species Act consultation handled through the U.S. Department of the Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began with a request package on August 31, 2022, was deemed complete on March 31, 2023 (about seven months behind schedule, and 7 months after the request), and concluded on August 31, 2023 (a total of 1 year from request to conclusion, also about seven months behind schedule). Another Endangered Species Act consultation led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries began with a request package on September 21, 2022, was determined complete on April 4, 2023 (about seven months behind schedule, and 6 months and 14 days after the request), and concluded on September 15, 2023 (about six months behind schedule, and 11 months and 25 days after the request).
Fisheries habitat review under the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, started with a request submitted on August 31, 2022 (about five months behind schedule), was determined complete on April 10, 2023 (about seven months behind schedule, and 7 months and 10 days after the request), and produced recommendations on July 21, 2023 (about eight and a half months behind schedule, and 10 months and 21 days after the request).
But wait, there’s more! Outside the 11 painstaking permits in the federal process, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind also had to clear a second layer of state approvals tied to the cable landfall, onshore construction footprint, and coastal jurisdiction. Virginia’s utility regulator, the Virginia State Corporation Commission, received Dominion’s application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity on November 5, 2021 and approved it on August 5, 2022 (about nine months later).
Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (with North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality for any cross-border coastal effects) began reviewing a Coastal Zone Management Act federal consistency certification in mid-December 2021. That review was repeatedly extended through agreed “stays,” and North Carolina ultimately issued a concurrence letter on June 24, 2022, while Virginia issued its concurrence letter on September 21, 2023 (roughly 21 months after the consistency package was received in Virginia).
Virginia’s Marine Resources Commission later issued a submerged lands / tidal wetlands permit on June 27, 2023, authorizing the project to encroach on state-owned subaqueous bottomlands and undertake tidal-wetlands work associated with installing offshore export cables and related crossings in support of the project. The permit terms were accepted on July 12, 2023 and executed on behalf of the Commission on July 13, 2023.
For state water-quality signoff associated with the Army Corps’ navigable-waters authorization, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality ultimately issued a Virginia Water Protection “No Permit Required” notification that included a Clean Water Act water-quality certification waiver on December 8, 2023.
And beyond all that, the project still carried a long list of additional requirements for which I could not find any public timetable. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality listed a Virginia Water Protection individual permit (state wetlands/streams impacts), a Clean Water Act water-quality certification (state confirmation that federally permitted discharges comply with water-quality standards), a conformity determination (an air-quality applicability determination coordinated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), an emergency generator general permit, a construction stormwater general permit authorization, a stormwater pollution prevention plan, and an erosion and sediment control plan. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation listed consultations related to Virginia Scenic Rivers and invasive-species management. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources listed natural-heritage/protected-species consultation, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources listed historic-properties consultation, the Virginia Department of Military Affairs/Virginia Army National Guard listed consultation tied to activities affecting the State Military Reservation, and the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and Virginia Department of Forestry each listed consultations.
And how could we forget local ordinances? *deep breath* Locally, the list included a floodplain development permit, land-disturbance permit, and conditional use permit/site plan review in the City of Virginia Beach, plus a floodplain development permit and conditional use permit/site plan review in Chesapeake, local wetlands board approvals in Virginia Beach for wetlands impacts, and a suite of transportation permits (for oversize/wide-load and similar moves) across various counties/municipalities and the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Three years, three months, and 23 days later
The overall completion date for federal environmental review and permitting was April 9, 2024 — a total of 3 years, 3 months, and 23 days after the Construction and Operations Plan was first submitted by Dominion. And if it took you less than that amount of time to read all that, I’m impressed. It’s no wonder that Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is one of the few projects to ever actually complete this process in the history of American offshore wind. Every single step in that process is a chokepoint, many of which offer opportunities for opponents of the project to block, sue, delay, or alter. And the entire time this process is happening, there’s inflation, changing interest rates, changing economic conditions, and changing demand in the electricity market that could, at the snap of a finger, make the project unviable.
Meanwhile, communities spend those many years paying more money to burn fossil fuels for electricity. Most of these permitting laws were passed with the intent of helping the environment. Many were bipartisan — the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and more were passed under Democratic Congresses and Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford in what many call the Golden Age of Environmental Policy. And the reviews they mandate are absolutely important. But when the time completing those reviews is spent burning more fossil fuels, which also contribute to dirtier water, threats to endangered wildlife, and climate change, at what point does speed have to become a priority?
After April 9, 2024, spending over 3 years on permitting, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind finally began construction. Yes, now construction can begin. And after construction advanced to roughly 50% completion, on December 22, 2025, the U.S. Department of the Interior suspended the project’s lease, citing national security concerns. This is despite the fact that, as you may remember in that labyrinth of regulations, the U.S. Army (through the Army Corps’ approvals) had already signed off on the relevant permits. Last Friday, January 16, a federal judge granted an injunction that allows the project to continue construction while fighting in court to overturn this order, and while that comes off as great news, the project still lost another month and Dominion now has to spend even more money to fight this lawsuit with no guarantee of success. We’re over 5 years and many millions of dollars past when that first federal application was submitted, and still no offshore wind.
I won’t deny that a government openly hostile to offshore wind makes a big difference. And of course when organized opposition groups sue, protest, and delay projects using the laws in this permitting process, the groups are to blame as much as the laws. But again, solar, onshore wind, and batteries thrived in 2025 despite these same forces. Offshore wind fell apart. And at the same time, consider Park City Wind in Connecticut. That project terminated in October 2023, in a state with very pro-wind lawmakers, during a Biden presidency that approved 11 offshore wind projects and showed every intention of encouraging the industry. New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts also saw major projects flop in 2024 in overwhelmingly supportive environments. I won’t walk you through their permitting history, tempted as I was. But it seems clear to me that for offshore wind in the United States, permitting poses a far more central and critical barrier than anything else, as well intentioned as the laws governing it may be.
Rocking the boat
And if that wasn’t enough laws standing in the way of offshore wind, there’s one more, and it’s perhaps the most pointless and most crushing of them all. The Jones Act is a World War I era U.S. shipping law that mandates that any maritime vessel transporting cargo from one U.S. port to another must be U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-crewed. This might seem like an innocuous way to protect American shipbuilders and promote national security, but in practice, it makes maritime shipping in the U.S. ridiculously expensive. For example, in 2013, the shipping company Matson ordered two container ships from an American shipyard for $209 million each. In 2022, Matson ordered three of the same ships from the same company for roughly $333 million each. But the cost to build a similar vessel in a foreign shipyard was evaluated in a 2018 analysis at about $30 million, less than a tenth of that. Because American shipyards are averaging only three oceangoing ships per year, high fixed costs are being spread across the fewer vessels, which limits volume discounts from suppliers, specialization, and economies of scale. Since maritime shipping touches industries across the U.S. economy, these added costs aren’t just felt by companies that need big boats, but every American, and especially so in Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico where maritime shipping is the only way to deliver goods.
How does that impact offshore wind? Turbine components arrive at U.S. ports and then need to be moved to offshore construction sites, but the industry relies on highly specialized wind-turbine installation vessels, and the U.S. has zero Jones Act-compliant vessels capable of doing that work. This creates a logistical constraint that other renewables simply don’t face: you can build solar farms and onshore wind with equipment that can be easily trucked and installed on land, but offshore wind’s core installation step is made impossible by a maritime shipping rule from over a century ago that has nothing to do with energy construction.
To get projects built anyway, developers have used workarounds to avoid ever traveling between two U.S. ports that add time, complexity, and cost. One workaround is the “feeder barge” system: smaller U.S.-flagged vessels shuttle components from a U.S. staging port to the offshore site, where a larger foreign-flagged turbine-installation vessel travels to the site from another country’s port, receives the parts, and installs them. Another workaround, used during Dominion’s early Virginia pilot work, involved ferrying parts back and forth from Canada to avoid running afoul of the Jones Act’s restrictions. These workarounds aren’t just awkward — they’re expensive and can introduce extra delay risk. Reviewing the costs of a Jones Act workaround, a 2018 study from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority found that when constructing an offshore wind farm, just using one turbine installation vessel costs 7% less than using a feeder barge system — saving over $41,000 for a single turbine. Those smaller feeder barges are also more susceptible to meteorological delays, and lifting heavy components from the feeder barge to the installation vessel brings risks of vessel damage, marine pollution, and even human casualties.
Understanding these impositions, Dominion decided to try the impossible: building the first Jones Act-compliant turbine-installation vessel. Dominion announced the plan in late 2020, and early reporting pegged the price tag at about $500 million. Over time, that cost has risen: Reuters reported the estimate increasing to $625 million in 2024, and later reporting put the cost at $715 million in 2025, attributing increases to factors like modifications needed for final turbine specifications and higher financing costs associated with a longer construction timeline and higher rates. When the solution to a regulation is a specialized vessel with a price tag approaching a billion dollars for just one of them, this cost becomes part of the cost of offshore wind itself, making the energy source significantly less viable.
Offshore wind’s collapse was absolutely the story of 2025, and I don’t want to take away from some of the excellent play-by-play reporting I read last year. But there is no one person — even the president — that can destroy the offshore wind industry on their own, as evidenced by every other renewable energy source finding success in 2025, and offshore wind falling apart under favorable conditions in the years leading up. If future decisionmakers want to revive offshore wind and achieve affordable electricity prices, it will take a lot more than approving permits, passing some subsidies, and sending good vibes. Only by seriously confronting the maze of regulations and chokepoints holding offshore wind back will the industry have any chance of taking off and replicating the success of other renewables on its own merits.
And clearly, that’s a significantly more boring conversation to have.