Wind and solar produce just a tiny (and unreliable) trickle of total American energy consumption
The wind industry faces political challenges. On January 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order halting approvals, permits and loans for new wind energy projects on federal lands or waters. The administration justified this by citing wind energy’s supposed unreliability and potential harm to wildlife.
This executive order raises concerns about long-term investment in wind. Developers may hesitate to invest due to high political risk.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a comprehensive review of the Department of the Interior’s offshore wind energy program. The report provides a postmortem of sorts on a policy agenda that, until recently, was speeding ahead under the Biden administration with the vigor of a runaway freight train. Under President Trump’s 2025 executive order, the brakes have been applied. No new leasing. No new permits. A full federal review is underway. (1)
The US Energy Department recently suspended a large grant at the University of Maine for research on floating wind technology. (2)
Maine averages just a mere 1,500 MW of electricity consumption, but they want to have a crazy 3,000 MW of offshore wind. This target assumes complete electrification of cars, trucks, home heat, etc.—the full transition, which is never going to happen.
Even worse, given the great offshore depths, this has to be floating wind which costs around three times as much as fixed bottom wind, which is already way too expensive. Floating wind is also environmentally destructive with a vast undersea web of anchoring cables.
Atlantic Shores South offshore wind farm was voided, just weeks after President Trump publicly hoped the project was ‘dead and gone.’ He got his wish. (3)
Atlantic Shores was supposed to deliver 2.8 gigawatts of electricity via 200 turbines, about 8.7 miles off the Jersey coast. But the public never bought the green utopia they were selling. Instead, people asked uncomfortable questions. Like: why are we installing massive metal structures in marine ecosystems to fix a problem that hasn’t been properly measured, modeled, or proven? The climate-industrial complex is finally facing a breeze it can’t spin.
The Trump administration is halting construction of a massive offshore wind project being built in federal waters off the coast of New York and ordering a sprawling review of existing offshore wind permits. (4)
Fishermen are lauding Trump’s move to halt New York offshore wind citing rushed approval and harm to marine life. (5)
The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, which is being built by Dominion Energy off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, is another large boondoggle project.
Like the New York project, the permitting process which enabled CVOW was muscled through the various federal agencies by the Biden administration with scant recognition of serious drawbacks to both the environment and national security. (6)
In summary, Virginia’s offshore wind project shares many of the same flaws as the Empire wind project including its rushed and subpar permitting procedure, environmental responsibilities and ratepayer deceit.
Solar and wind energy, wrong for Nebraska reports David Begley. The main reason is economics. The essential problem is that solar and wind are intermittent power sources, but electricity demand is constant. Nebraska’s public power districts are required by law to produce only reliable power. Only dispatchable power is reliable. (7)
Some companies earned millions when Britain’s wind farms switch off. A total of 400 million pounds was spent last year on so-called curtailment, when wind turbines are told to stop generating because the grid is too congested to accept their power. (8)
Firing up alternative plants—in many cases gas fueled ones- to replace this electricity elsewhere on the system also costs the taxpayer upwards of 600 million pounds.
Some wind farm companies are making tens of millions of pounds from the switch-offs.
This 400 million-pounds will be a drop in the ocean compared to what is coming in the next few years.
In the future, if wind capacity is tripled as planned, there will be too much wind power for much of the year across the whole of the country, as on windy days it will exceed demand. (8)
Britain’s offshore wind farms are a clear and present danger to vital air defenses, with the Labor Government forced to spend an astonishing 1.5 billion pounds in the next two years to try to guarantee the integrity of the country’s early warning radar network. Wind turbines cause havoc with radar since the rotating blades create Doppler shifts that hinder detection of enemy aircraft, drones and missiles. The problem has been known for some time, but it s getting worse as anywhere turbine blades get larger. There is no guarantee that the enormous sums recently allocated will fix the problems despite amounting to 2.5% of the entire UK defense budget of around 60 billion pounds. (9)
The French are finding out that combining nuclear power with unstable wind and sun is not a good idea and is a risk to the power grid. A recent report concluded that further expansion of wind and solar energy in France poses a serious risk to the country’s power grid. (10)
A recent shutdown of the Bernagues wind farm in Herault, France, marked a long overdue reckoning with the lethal impacts of wind energy on wildlife—particularly raptors like the golden eagle. In April, a French court ordered the entire site to cease operations form one year following the confirmed death of a golden eagle, a protected species that collided with one of the farm’s turbine blades in January 2023. (11)
This isn’t just a one-off judicial reaction. It represents a seismic shift in how the French legal system, and perhaps the broader public, are beginning to confront the uncomfortable truth about wind energy’s collateral damage.
France’s court system has done what most governments have failed to do, impose real accountability on an industry that’s been operating with impunity. The Bernagues decision should serve as a precedent, not an anomaly. It’s a milestone in holding the wind industry to the same environmental standards it pretends to uphold.
After a 12-year legal battle, a Dublin judge ordered a wind company to shutter three of six turbines and pay nearby property owners $411,000 in damages. (12)
In the second quarter of 2024 the wind didn’t blow very much anywhere. Then there were calm days of April to June when the wind turbines on the continent stood still. At one point $20 billion dollars-worth of wind power could only make as much power as two diesel generators. For some reason none of the expert climate models saw any of that coming far enough for planning ahead. (13)
The Netherlands will postpone tenders for two offshore wind farms with a total capacity of 2 gigawatts due to a lack of interest from potential bidders.
The Dutch Climate ministry said in March that interest for the sites it wanted to tender was very low after energy firms Eneco and Orsted had said they saw no viable business case without subsidies. (14)
Germany’s first offshore wind farm is to be dismantled after just 15 years of operation. Why? A decisive factor for dismantling the pioneer project is the expiration of generous subsidies made possible through Germany’s renewable energies feed-in-act. The subsidy meant that the Alpha Venus wind farm got 15.4 cents per kilowatt hour after being put in operation. Now that the subsidy has run out, the wind farm operators receive only the basic tariff of 3.9 cents per kilowatt hour, thus making the farm unprofitable. (15)
An old wind turbine spun completely out of control at a wind farm in Central Saxony, and couldn’t be stopped.
The approximately 30-year-old turbine went into an uncontrolled spin in strong winds after the braking systems failed. Despite several attempts, technicians were initially unable to stop the rotor blades spinning unchecked. Only when the wind died down did the turbine gradually come to a standstill. (16)
The incident worries the wind industry as the runaway wind turbine could not be stopped due to an emergency brake failure and thus posed a serious safety risk.
As older turbines age, they become uneconomical to operate. Operators tend to cut corners when it comes to maintenance and repairs, which can be extensive for the older ones.
Wind and solar produce just a tiny (and unreliable) trickle of total American energy consumption, yet in 2024 there were at least 43 instances of tower collapses, solar panel, fires, turbine fires, blades being thrown, and pollution from improper blade disposal. (17)
While green advocates use the terms renewable, sustainable and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills. (18)
The discussion about what to do with worn out solar and wind equipment is one topic usually elided in net zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs.
Artificially propping up wind and solar energy, rather than letting the market drive which energy sources are the most affordable, reliable and clean, is costing American consumers. In 2022, an analysis of the largest increase requests across the country found that every single one of eight companies listed wind and solar investments or the energy transition as one of the primary reasons for raising electricity prices, and multiple companies explicitly cited state mandates for clean energy or greenhouse gas reductions to justify the rate increases. (19)
The idea that power should get cheaper as we get more green energy is only true if we exclusively use electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
But modern societies need power around the clock. When there is no sun and wind, green energy needs plenty of backup, often powered by fossil fuels. What this means is that we pay for not one but two power systems. (20)
This means the real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher.
One study looking at China showed that the real cost of solar power on average turns out to be twice as high as coal, while a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels.
Read next: Japan’s Offshore Wind Issues: A Lesson For Others
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