A major foreign offshore wind developer is pausing its operations in the U.S. amid the Trump administration’s assault against the industry, Reuters reported Friday.
RWE, a German multinational energy company with a large offshore wind presence in the U.S., is stopping its offshore wind activity in American waters for now, Reuters reported. The company is pausing its operations because of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to crack down on the industry, which benefited from large subsidies and favorable regulation under the Biden administration.
“In the U.S. … we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being,” RWE CEO Markus Krebber said in a speech released ahead of the company’s annual meeting reviewed by Reuters. “We remain cautious given the political developments.”
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“We had already announced in November that we did not expect to invest in our offshore wind activities in the USA as planned. Accordingly, our project activities were largely discontinued, as communicated at the beginning of the year,” a RWE spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The project was still under development anyway, construction had not yet begun and the company had not yet made a final investment decision. The speech at the Annual General Meeting also refers to this mentioning that we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being; there is no new status.”
RWE has rights to build offshore wind infrastructure at three sites, but the company indicated in March it had essentially wound those operations down to a bare minimum without officially pausing its operations, according to Reuters.
Notably, RWE hired Amanda Lefton, who formerly ran the Biden Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), shortly after she left the government in 2023.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily suspended offshore wind leasing in federal waters and began a review of the government’s permitting practices in one of his first actions upon being sworn into office in January. Trump routinely railed against offshore wind as a candidate on the campaign trail.
The Biden administration subsidized and supported a large expansion of offshore wind generation, even as critics and activists highlighted that the projects made little economic sense and posed potentially serious risks to marine ecosystems.
Earlier in April, the Trump administration ordered Equinor — another European energy company seeking to industrialize America’s oceans — to halt construction on its Empire Wind 1 project off the New York coast. The Trump administration has alleged that the Biden administration relied on flawed science in the permitting process for Empire Wind 1 as it rushed to get the project underway.
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