The Trump administration has effectively frozen 165 new onshore wind farm developments in the US, leaving the projects on private land in limbo, the Financial Times reported yesterday. Combined, they represent around 30 gigawatts of electric generating capacity.
The Financial Times, citing the American Clean Power Association and other sources, reports that the Pentagon is holding up approvals* across a wide swath of projects – including some that were close to final sign-off, others still under negotiation, and even projects that wouldn’t normally fall under Pentagon review.
Since August 2025, wind developers have faced canceled meetings, long stretches of silence, and applications that are no longer being processed, according to people familiar with the situation, the Financial Times reported.
Letters sent to developers in early April said the Pentagon is now reviewing how it evaluates the national security impact of energy projects.
That justification has been wheeled out before. The Trump administration tried to halt offshore wind projects by pointing to classified national security concerns tied to radar interference – a move that triggered legal challenges, and the administration was ultimately unsuccessful in court.
The Trump administration also recently paid nearly $2 billion to offshore wind development companies to abandon their leases off the East and West coasts.
The timing is tone deaf. The US clean power sector is booming: In 2025 alone, it attracted $79 billion in investment, supported more than 1.4 million jobs, and accounted for over 90% of all new electricity capacity added to the grid, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Electrek’s Take
This is beyond absurd.
“National security” is being used here as a catch-all excuse, and it’s weak. We’ve already seen this play out with offshore wind: The Trump administration tried to stop five projects using similar claims, and every single one was overturned in court as unlawful.
Now the same playbook is being used to stall onshore wind – including projects on private land that don’t involve the Pentagon at all. That’s not a targeted security review; that’s a blanket slowdown.
The US is in the middle of a massive clean energy buildout that’s creating jobs and adding desperately needed power to the grid. At the same time, global energy markets are under pressure because of the US war with Iran. If anything, this is when you double down on domestic energy sources that are cheap, fast to build, and already scaling, which is what the rest of the world is doing in the face of the Middle East conflict.
Instead, the Trump administration is sidelining one of the country’s biggest sources of new power using a weak justification that courts have already rejected.
It’s not a security policy. It’s petty, costly obstruction that stems from one man who just doesn’t like wind farms – except it affects millions of people.
*Source: New York Times
Read more: 5 offshore wind farms move ahead after Trump admin misses appeal deadline
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