President Donald Trump has called wind turbines costly and ugly. With a stroke of his pen, he also added a new roadblock to Maine’s quest to meet its climate goals.
By signing a first-day executive order that halts offshore wind lease sales and pauses permitting for both onshore and offshore wind projects, the new president has potentially upended Maine’s statutory target of using 100 percent clean energy by 2040. The state’s plan to do so relies on installing 3,000 megawatts of offshore wind by that same year.
Don’t expect immediate changes to that plan. But the path to meeting the energy goals would be narrow without offshore wind. Gov. Janet Mills and lawmakers will likely need to have new conversations about boosting other renewables. Maine has other large projects that could make big dents and natural advantages that still position the state well, experts said.
“Our state is going to be looked at repeatedly as the source of renewable power generation for [New England],” Richard Silkman, an energy economist who co-chairs the board of directors for Portland-based Competitive Energy Services, said.
Trump wants to boost production of fossil fuels that contribute to climate change to fulfill an aim of having the lowest-cost energy of any nation. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s most recent report said renewables generated 67 percent of electricity here in 2023.
The Democratic governor and her energy office kept the offshore wind target in an updated state energy plan released this month. The Mills administration said in a statement it is reviewing Trump’s slew of executive orders to “understand their implications for our work.”
The Central Maine Power Co. corridor that will bring Quebec hydropower to the regional grid through western Maine is set to be completed at the end of this year. Maine is trying to become a national leader in battery storage, but the state’s target for that nascent energy source is only 400 megawatts by 2030, or roughly an eighth of the offshore wind target for 10 years later.
Maine is already New England’s leader in wind power, with the most recent federal data finding it generated about a quarter of the state’s electricity in 2023. Silkman said Maine would not have the capacity to scale up solar, hydro and nuclear power to replace offshore wind, which he said in a 2020 analysis should become the state’s dominant power source over time.
Maine and the federal government reached a lease agreement before Trump’s election to develop the nation’s first floating offshore wind research array in the Gulf of Maine. Up to 12 offshore turbines developed by the University of Maine would generate up to 144 megawatts.
An offshore wind lease sale last October for four areas in the Gulf of Maine could result in more than 15 gigawatts, or 15,000 megawatts, of renewable energy, though other states would use that power besides Maine. The state’s effort to build an offshore wind port on Sears Island also struggled to win federal funding under former President Joe Biden’s administration.
It is not yet clear if Trump’s orders could doom every project, but Jack Shapiro, the Natural Resources Council of Maine’s climate and clean energy director, said there is “a long way to go” before the state needs to reassess its climate goals.
“This is bad, but it’s not the end of the world,” Shapiro said, noting Trump’s first administration from 2017 to 2021 touted the benefits of offshore wind.
Other questions remain. The federal government awarded last year a $425 million grant for a northern Maine wind and transmission line project that would bring 1,200 megawatts to Maine and other New England states, after an initial deal died because of a pricing dispute.
It had many of the same opponents as the Sears Island wind terminal, including legislative Republicans from coastal and inland areas. Rep. Reagan Paul, R-Winterport, hailed Trump’s wind order, calling on Mills to stop spending state money on offshore wind planning.
Shapiro noted Trump’s executive order on wind power included onshore projects but did not mention “transmission” projects like the one envisioned in Aroostook County. CMP parent Avangrid, which won a capacity contract for the transmission line, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Legal challenges could further complicate Trump’s wind order, but Maine should otherwise not “pull back from what we’re doing,” former Maine Public Utilities Commission Chair Tom Welch. In any case, the “level of uncertainty has ratcheted up,” he said.
“When you have people in the White House who don’t believe in science, things get very complicated,” Welch said.
