MAINE MORNING STAR • August 4, 2025
Offshore wind leasing is effectively dead in the U.S. following a Trump administration order issued last week. Large swaths of U.S. waters that had been identified by federal agencies as ideal for offshore wind are no longer eligible for such developments under an Interior Department statement released Wednesday. In the four-sentence statement, the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) said the U.S. government is “de-designating over 3.5 million acres of unleased federal waters previously targeted for offshore wind development across the Gulf of America, Gulf of Maine, the New York Bight, California, Oregon, and the Central Atlantic.” The move comes just a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his staff to stop “preferential treatment for wind projects” and falsely called wind energy “unreliable.”