A French energy giant is halting a plan to build an offshore wind farm near the New York-New Jersey coastline following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month.
TotalEnergies SE, the Paris-based oil and gas conglomerate, said it would halt the project in what industry observers say is a sign of things to come under a second Trump administration.
“Offshore wind, I have decided to put the project on pause” with Trump’s return, Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne told a conference in London on Tuesday. His comments were reported by Bloomberg News.
Pouyanne said that the company plans to revisit the project in four years, when political winds in the US could shift once again.
“I said to my team, the project in New York, we’ll see that in four years,” he was quoted as saying by Bloomberg News. “But the advantage is it’s only for four years.”
Total’s subsidiary, Attentive Energy, was one of six companies that committed a total of $4.37 billion in 2022 to build offshore wind farms in New York Bight — the body of water that hugs the coastline stretching from Cape May Inlet in New Jersey to the Montauk Point on Long Island’s eastern tip.
The planned project is still in the early stages as the companies recently obtained leasing rights from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — the federal agency which operates under the auspices of the Department of the Interior.
Many of the largest offshore wind companies put a brave face on the election results, pledging to work with Trump and Congress to build power projects and ignoring the incoming president’s oft-stated hostility to them.
In campaign appearances, Trump railed against offshore wind and promised to sign an executive order to block such projects.
“We are going to make sure that that ends on Day 1,” Trump said in a May speech.
“I’m going to write it out in an executive order. It’s going to end on Day 1.”
“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
There is almost 65 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity under development in the US, enough to power more than 26 million homes, and some turbines are already spinning in several states, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Currently operating projects include the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project and the South Fork Wind Farm about 35 miles east of Montauk Point.
Trump is unlikely to end those projects but might have more leverage over ones still in the planning stage, those in the debate say.
“Amid the changing political landscape, we are not surprised to see a developer pause an offshore wind project that’s in the preliminary stages of development,” Timothy Fox, a managing director of the Washington-based research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told Bloomberg News.
“We think other projects that are not in the advanced stages could stall too.”
Meanwhile, the outgoing Biden administration is shelling out billions of dollars for clean energy and approving major offshore wind projects as officials race to secure major climate initiatives before President Joe Biden’s term comes to an end.
Last month, the BOEM approved the nation’s 10th large offshore wind farm, the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, in September, reaching the halfway mark for Biden’s goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.
On Oct. 1, the agency gave a key approval to an offshore wind farm project in New Jersey.
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