Another Trump US offshore wind casualty as SouthCoast warns of delays
CEO testimony in 17-state suit against President’s sector attack reveals Administration slow rolling permits to strangle project
Ocean Winds warned that Donald Trump’s anti-offshore wind memorandum could delay or even derail entirely its 1.2GW SouthCoast array to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, signaling another potential casualty in the President's ongoing sector war.
As long promised, Trump issued a memorandum freezing offshore wind permitting and leasing on his first day in office and recently said: “We're not going to let windmills destroy our country any more than it's already been destroyed.”
The memo, which also put existing projects under review with a goal of termination, was a hammer blow to the already hard-pressed sector, and paused all but the three developments already in construction.
For SouthCoast, it meant "indefinite" delays to receiving its final three federal permits.
US coastal regulator Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) greenlighted the project’s environmental review and construction plan last year, but Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Marine Fisheries Service permits remain outstanding despite being scheduled no later than March 27, 2025.
Federal agencies have “delayed their final action on SouthCoast Wind permits on multiple occasions, each time directly citing the Presidential Memorandum as rationale,” said Michael Brown, CEO of Ocean Winds North America in written testimony released last week.
If the Presidential memorandum is not lifted, “issuance of SouthCoast Wind’s final three federal permits will remain paused indefinitely, the development of the Project will continue to be delayed indefinitely, and SouthCoast Wind will continue to incur hundreds of millions of dollars in costs directly related to the delay,” he added.
Offshore wind pioneer New York is spearheading the suit that includes mostly Democratic-voting states.
The loss of this critical permit, as well as market uncertainty surrounding Trump’s memo “and other actions taken by the current administration”, prompted the developer to petition New Jersey regulators to cancel its offtake contract.
SouthCoast survivor
Located in the Massachusetts wind energy area some 23 miles (37km) off Nantucket, the lease was acquired during the first Trump administration in 2018 for $135m.
“Without clarity on when or how issues arising under the Presidential Memorandum will be resolved, it may be impossible for the parties to execute the PPA,” Brown said.
“SouthCoast Wind will be forced to abandon current negotiations,” Brown added.
The array is on track to lose $70m this year as Trump's actions forced it to cancel “critical path supply contracts, which resulted in further delays to the Project’s development and immediate financial losses tens of millions of dollars in payments of termination fees,” Brown added.
The end result is “a minimum two-year delay to SouthCoast Wind’s ability to deliver power to the grid as the critical path supply chain needs to be rebuilt again from scratch, and new PPAs negotiated,” he said.