No, we're not tired of winning yet, and this one's a win for sane energy policy as well as a win for the American taxpayers. On Wednesday, we learned that the Trump administration is cancelling yet another tiresome Biden-era "green" energy boondoggle. This time, it's windmills.
President Donald Trump's Interior Department is canceling what would have been one of the largest land-based wind farms in the United States after former President Joe Biden's "last-minute" push to approve the project during his final weeks in office.
The Lava Ridge Wind Project, approved in December 2024 by the Biden administration's Bureau of Land Management, was expected to be a 1,000-megawatt wind farm with up to 231 wind turbines across nearly 57,447 acres in southern Idaho.
Following a review of the project by the Trump administration, officials at the Interior Department claimed to find "crucial legal deficiencies" with Biden's approval of the project, including certain statutorily binding criteria that were ignored, according to a press release announcing the decision to terminate the wind farm project.
Crucial legal deficiencies or not, this is a project that deserved to be on the chopping block, and if the left wants to complain about the Trump administration using what indeed may be a bureaucratic solution to get rid of a bad project, then they're welcome to try to make that case. We can always point to any one of the thousands of times that the left has tied up something worthwhile in layers of bureaucratic buncombe. This Idaho project would have seen hundreds of windmills installed over 75,000 acres of government land, preventing much of it from other uses. This was bad policy, as well as being bad for the area, which is traditionally used for ranching, hunting, and a variety of other purposes.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had this to say:
"Under President Donald Trump's bold leadership, the Department is putting the brakes on deficient, unreliable energy and putting the American people first," said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. "By reversing the Biden administration's thoughtless approval of the Lava Ridge Wind Project, we are protecting tens of thousands of acres from harmful wind policy while shielding the interests of rural Idaho communities. This decisive action defends the American taxpayer, safeguards our land, and averts what would have been one of the largest, most irresponsible wind projects in the nation."
Wind power is impractical in grid-scale applications like this. Barring any unimaginable technological breakthroughs, it always will be.
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Not only are these windmills big and ugly, but they also kill so many hawks, eagles, and other large birds that the federal government is reluctant to release numbers. The primary problem, though, as always, remains energy density. Wind power suffers from the standard problems in "green" energy; it is intermittent, it is unreliable, and it comes with only a fraction of the energy density of traditional fuels. If these installations were economically feasible, they wouldn't require subsidies; that plants like the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Project never seem to be privately funded speaks volumes.
This decision is a win for American energy policy, it's a win for the people of Idaho, and it's a win for the taxpayers.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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