Wind turbines generate electricity at the Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island. President Donald Trump’s administration has pledged billions of dollars to persuade developers to abandon offshore wind leases. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Louisiana’s offshore wind industry has a date circled on the calendar: Jan. 21, 2029 — the first day after President Donald Trump is scheduled to leave office.
Industry leaders say Trump’s policies have brought offshore wind development to a near standstill, but they are trying to preserve Louisiana’s wind expertise and supply chain in hopes of reviving the industry under the next administration.
“Come January 21st, 2029, we all get to wave goodbye,” said state Rep. Joe Orgeron, a Larose Republican who worked in the offshore wind industry. “The current administration has been a one-man stopping show. I’m pretty confident, and I’m hopeful that it’ll change.”
Orgeron later put the industry’s near-term strategy more succinctly: “Just wait for the clock to run out.”
His views were echoed by the other wind energy experts on the panel at Tulane University’s Future of Energy Forum on Tuesday.
“The Trump administration has been pretty openly hostile to seeing the advancement of the offshore wind industry,” said Madelyn Smith, a program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition.
Trump’s second-term efforts to halt the industry’s growth started with executive orders withdrawing federal waters from new offshore wind leases and halting permitting for any additional projects. Last year, the Trump administration issued a series of stop-work orders for all of the projects under construction. When that sparked a legal fight, the administration shifted tactics, offering federal money for offshore wind developers to simply walk away from their projects.
“For many reasons, it’s very compelling,” Smith said of the payout offers. “And there’s no real pathway for progress in the next two to three years, and some of these leases are quite expensive.”
Smith said developers have relinquished 12 offshore wind leases in exchange for federal payouts, including plans for a 2-gigawatt wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico south of Lake Charles.
“About $4 billion of taxpayer money has been spent to remove those from the pool,” she said. “And those projects also represented about 21 gigawatts of potential capacity.”
That’s enough energy to electricity to power more than 5 million homes.
Several Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore wind farms on the East Coast. Orgeron’s family supply boat business and several Louisiana engineers and metal fabricators helped build the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm near Block Island, Rhode Island, in 2016.
The work for Louisiana companies grew from there. By 2024, nearly a quarter of all offshore wind work contracts in the U.S. had gone to Gulf-based firms, with about $1 billion in investments flowing to the region’s ship and fabrication yards, according to the Oceantic Network, an industry trade group.
Louisiana colleges shifted their curricula to meet the growing demand for workers. Nunez Community College in Chalmette launched a two-year turbine technician program while the University of New Orleans started the Wind Energy Hub, offering engineering scholarships and internships with offshore wind companies.
RWE, the German energy company that held the Gulf lease, planned to tap into this workforce to build its wind farm about 44 miles south of Lake Charles by 2035. It also had a customer for its power, securing a deal with Entergy to deliver electricity to an estimated 350,000 homes in Louisiana and Texas.
But as the offshore wind industry expanded, Trump became an increasingly vocal opponent, repeatedly criticizing wind turbines and eventually pledging to halt new projects.
Trump’s opposition to wind energy dates to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil views from a golf course he planned to develop.
Since then, he has frequently derided wind energy, portraying turbines as threats to property values and wildlife while also claiming that the technology spikes food prices, causes cancer and can even drive people insane.
The president’s opposition to offshore wind has stalled and at times derailed Louisiana businesses that had steered investment toward supporting the industry, said James Martin, CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, an Avondale-based company that builds and tests wind blades.
“It is a shame,” he said at the Tulane forum. “It’s been a big pause button on what was a sleeping giant of an industry.”
Martin’s company has tried to adapt by seeking work in the aerospace and defense sectors.
“There’s huge layoffs in the wind space, and some of the best engineers on the planet —– they’re giving up,” he said.
The panelists are confident the industry can be quickly revived. Demand for wind energy remains high, and the technology has bipartisan support in Louisiana, said Orgeron, who has backed pro-wind energy bills in the legislature.
For Martin, the task now is to keep Louisiana’s wind manufacturing capacity “warm” until the political climate changes. Letting it go cold means other states could leap ahead once a new administration takes office.
“If you let that manufacturing go away … it’s going to be really hard to build the momentum and start that back up again,” he said.
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
