Trump takes aim at windmills
NPR | By Tamara Keith
Published March 24, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT
The high cost of power bills is shaping up to be a political issue in this year's midterm elections. But when it comes to generating electricity, President Trump is picking winners and losers. He's pushing companies to keep aging coal-powered plants online.
And then there's wind energy, which Trump hates.
"I can proudly say, Doug, that we have not approved one windmill since I've been in office. And we're going to keep it that way. My goal is to not let any windmill be built. They're losers," Trump said to his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, at a recent White House event.
At Trump's urging, Burgum has actively worked to thwart wind projects on land and offshore.
On Monday, Burgam's Interior Department announced it will pay a French energy company, TotalEnergies, nearly $1 billion to stop plans to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Instead, TotalEnergies will take the money it had paid during the Biden administration for federal offshore land leases and reinvest some of it into a liquefied natural gas plant in Texas. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné described the agreement to forfeit its leases for U.S. offshore wind farms as "innovative."
The president, meanwhile, repeats his distaste for wind power often and usually without any prompting at all, like he did last week in the Oval Office with the prime minister of Ireland.
"They're very bad environmentally; they kill the birds; they're unsightly; they make a lot of noise," Trump said.
Turbine collisions do kill birds, though far fewer than outdoor cats and building collisions do, according to the National Audubon Society. But for Trump, this really isn't about science. Attacking wind energy is more of a passion project.
And in this second Trump term, it is the policy of the U.S. government. Long-planned projects have stalled, awaiting federal approvals that aren't coming. And the administration took the highly unusual step of pausing construction for five offshore wind power projects that were already being built off the East Coast by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Virginia.
"This is unprecedented, and no one saw this coming," said Kit Kennedy, managing director of the power unit at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
"These are projects that are creating tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. They represent billions and billions of dollars of investment and were near completion when these stop-work orders come down," Kennedy said.
The companies building the projects sued, and judges have rejected the administration's arguments. With preliminary injunctions in place, construction has resumed, and one project is already delivering power.
But Trump and his administration are pushing ahead. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers says that former President Joe Biden was the one picking favorites and that Trump's "energy dominance agenda is unleashing reliable, affordable, secure energy sources to meet growing demands."
The article continues at https://www.mainepublic.org/npr-news/2026-03-24/trump-takes-aim-at-...
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Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law
Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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