This is the fault of central planners who ignored market realities in pursuit of their green desiderata.
Donald Trump’s supporters and opponents alike are giving the president credit for “killing” an offshore wind farm project along the coast of New Jersey.
An executive order pausing permitting for offshore wind projects cast doubt on that project’s viability, New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities indicated in a statement this week. It is indisputable that creating uncertainty in this market threw a wrench in the works. But as Politico confessed, the “challenges” that Governor Phil Murphy’s project encountered “include economic conditions beyond Murphy’s control and Trump.”
Even before she acknowledged the “uncertainty” Trump had created, New Jersey Board of Public Utilities president Christine Guhl-Sadovy cited “a number of reasons” for Murphy’s decision to back off his environmentalist objectives. Among them, “Shell (PLC) backing out as an equity partner in the Atlantic Shores project and backing away from the American clean energy market.”
You see, the construction of nearly 150 wind turbines off the coast of Atlantic City was supposed to be financed by shifting the costs to New Jersey’s ratepayers. But of the five projects the state government initially approved, two were canceled in 2023 by a Danish contractor, citing the high cost and limited availability of materials.
Politico maintains that the remaining three projects were “plodding along — until Trump took office.” But in December, another contractor requested an extension of an ongoing pause on construction from state regulators, citing “ongoing difficulties in securing a manufacturer for key turbine components.” As the firm’s request conceded, the “offshore wind equipment market continues to experience significant price volatility, and the company has not yet identified a solution to that volatility.” Another contractor, Attentive, sought a similar pause after Trump’s inauguration, but it, too, had been withdrawing from similar jobs even before Trump’s election.
Ultimately, it seems like the entire scheme became unsustainable, and it would have been even in the absence of Trump’s hostility toward offshore wind projects. “‘First Orsted pulled out of these projects, and now Shell is following suit,’” said Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, a longtime critic of windfarms off New Jersey’s coast. ‘The promises made by the offshore wind industry were always too good to be true, and even the New Jersey Ratepayer Advocate has acknowledged that these projects would have driven our energy rates even higher than they already are.’”
Politico did, however, acknowledge the scale of the defeat Murphy’s reluctant acceptance of reality dealt out to the environmentalist movement. “All these project deaths and delays are devastating to Murphy’s climate change and economic development agenda,” the report conceded. “Environmentalists and some labor unions who have long championed offshore wind have also had their hopes dashed.”
The collapse of these projects imposes unnecessary hardship on the contractors who counted on this work. Yet, their hardship is the fault of central planners who ignored market realities in pursuit of their green desiderata. Trump didn’t do this to anyone. Economics did.