Wind Energy Wins As Trump Campaign Winds Down

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Oh the irony, it burns. Former President Trump constantly hammered on wind energy as he coasted to victory as a candidate for the Oval Office in 2016. He continued pounding away during his losing bid for a second term in 2020. Now here we are in 2024, the US wind industry is firing on all cylinders and Trump is still blowing hot air, well, not just hot air…ewwwww…ick…

Trump Blows Hot Air, Wind Energy Wins

To be clear, Trump has not entirely dropped his attacks on wind energy. However, in the waning days of the campaign he has put wind turbines aside to attack women in a series of bizarre, torpid fantasies about alternately between protecting women “whether they like it or not,” and setting a nine-barrel firing squad upon a prominent female rival.

Miming a female-focused sex act on stage would be a next logical step for such a candidate, and Trump did not disappoint. He went there on Friday night, in a widely reported performance during a rally in Milwaukee.

“Trump, in one of his final rallies on Friday night, simulated sexually stroking and then performing oral sex on his malfunctioning microphone in Milwaukee,” reported Kevin Manahan for NJ Advance Media at NJ.com.

The physical act apparently triggered a linguistic torrent as well. Manahan noted that Trump followed up his graphic illustration of a blow job by exclaiming, “I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic. I’m blowing out my left arm. Now I’m going to blow out my right arm and I’m blowing out my damn throat, too.”

Ouch! For all that blowing, Trump’s longstanding opposition to wind energy in the US has gone for naught. Exhibit A is a massive 2.6-gigawatt offshore wind energy project under way off the coast of Virginia under the wing of Dominion Energy.

On November 1 — the same day Trump chose to demonstrate his enthusiasm for blowing — Dominion reported that its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is on track and on budget for completion in 2026. The company met its goal of laying 78 monopile foundations for the new wind turbines this year, topping its initial goal of 70. After the winter storm season passes, Dominion expects work to resume in 2025 towards the complete total of 176 wind turbines (see more offshore wind background here).

More Winning For Wind Energy In The USA

Speaking of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, Trump’s experience with offshore wind turbines may have influenced his decision to make them a frequent target of attack during his 2016 campaign. Nevertheless, after he gained office the US Department of the Interior continued to grease the wheels for an offshore wind energy revolution in the US under his very nose.

Prior to Trump’s term in office, the federal government had no working structure for approving offshore wind leases in US waters.  The nation’s first commercial wind farm, the Block Island project, was constructed during the Obama administration in state waters off the coast of Rhode Island. It would have been predated by an earlier wind energy project in a federal lease area off the coast of Massachusetts under approval by the US Army Corps of Engineers. However, that project, called Cape Wind, foundered in 2017 following years of litigation sparked by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. among others.

Forewarned by the Cape Wind debacle, the Interior Department passed its time during the Trump administration by fine-tuning and streamlining a formal process for mapping and approving wind energy lease areas in federal waters, to be administered by BOEM, the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Maine Hops Onto The Offshore Wind Bandwagon

One of the first projects to go through the BOEM process was the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts. The road ahead is still bumpy — an earlier iteration of the project was withdrawn and an organization linked to fossil fuel stakeholders is fighting it in court — but other projects are moving forward and the Virginia project is just the tip of the iceberg.

On October 29, BOEM announced the results of its first offshore wind lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, where wind developers face the additional challenge of deploying new floating wind turbine technology. Two provisional winners made the cut for a total of four lease areas, Avangrid Renewables and Invenergy NE Offshore Wind. If and when all four areas are fully built out, BOEM expects the projects to yield the equivalent electricity demand of more than 2.3 million typical homes.

The Interior Department also took the occasion to remind the voting public that Trump’s efforts to block wind energy in the US did not survive Inauguration Day 2021.

In all, BOEM has passed 10 commercial projects through the new process totaling more than 15 gigawatts. Much of the activity has taken place along the Atlantic coast, where conditions are optimal for offshore wind energy. However, the office also recently held its first ever sales for coastal states along the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean, among a total of six lease sales since the Biden-Harris administration took office.

If Vice President Kamala Harris prevails on Election Day, look for plenty more where that came from. Last spring the Interior Department announced a new five-year offshore wind energy leasing schedule. Including sales conducted this year, the agency anticipates up to 12 offshore lease sales through 2028 covering waters in US territories as well as the states bordering the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico.

Whether or not that happens is up to the voting public. Based on early voting participation, the future of wind energy is in the hands of the very female voters Trump has been blowing off.

I’m just wondering — and perhaps you are, too — if this more more expressive form of misogyny in recent weeks is a consequence of Trump’s desire to grab the media spotlight away from his own running mate JD Vance, who has gained considerable notoriety for his own “odd fixation with fertility.”

Or perhaps Trump has simply forgotten that he is supposed to be campaigning for the most powerful elected office in the nation if not the entire world. Instead, he is happily engaged in re-creating the glory days of his former self, when he was younger, more vigorous, and free to express his “grab ’em by the pussy” theory of male power to his peers in industry — the US entertainment industry, that is.

Photo (cropped): The US offshore wind energy industry has survived, and thrived, despite attempts by former President Trump and others to blow it off (courtesy of Dominion Energy via Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind).