Introduction
Despite declaring an energy emergency and promising to lower energy bills, the Trump administration continues to execute actions that threaten renewable energy supply and could raise electricity prices as a result. Specifically, on December 22, 2025, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that all five U.S. offshore wind projects that are actively under construction must stop construction. If developers are forced to cancel their projects because of this freeze, ratepayers across 15 states and Washington, D.C., would have to pay close to an additional $100 every year, on average, for the next 10 years on their electricity bills. Furthermore, offshore wind workers could lose tens of millions of dollars in future wages, communities could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and 100 million people could suffer from reduced grid reliability.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s attack, the developers of the frozen projects took legal action, and all five projects have won the right to resume construction temporarily. Nevertheless, the Trump administration has stated its intention to appeal the courts’ decisions, leaving the threat of further delays or project cancellations open. This assault on offshore wind is the latest in a series of attacks against the offshore wind industry and clean energy at large, despite the fact that clean energy is often cheaper than energy from natural gas.
Even without fully canceling these projects, the Trump administration’s freeze is already hurting ratepayers. The offshore wind freeze raised prices for ratepayers in Massachusetts, where one week of paused construction on Vineyard Wind 1 cost them $2 million in benefits. Ratepayers in Connecticut and throughout New England will also have to pay more for electricity as a result of Revolution Wind’s delay, for a total of approximately $7 million. Meanwhile, ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic have started to pay for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project on their bills. By freezing the project, the Trump administration risks forcing developers to cancel it, leaving ratepayers without the project or the power for which they are already paying.
Losing the five targeted projects would cost ratepayers money because offshore wind is a cheaper source of new power than fossil fuels. When grid operators buy electricity from oil or natural gas, prices are subject to supply and demand fluctuations caused by the global markets, extreme weather, and other factors. In contrast, electricity prices from offshore wind are much less volatile because the projects are often held by a contract that stabilizes the price and do not have to buy fuel to produce power. Additionally, more power from offshore wind on the grid leads to less reliance on expensive fossil fuels, the prices of which tend to rise in the winter. Offshore wind’s stable price combined with a lack of fuel costs means that grid operators can expect the price of electricity from the five projects to be cheaper in the winter than the price of electricity from another source—namely, natural gas. This is especially true during cold snaps in New England, a region that has trouble acquiring as much fuel as it needs due to supply constraints. For example, natural gas prices shot up by 17 percent for Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, whereas offshore wind prices likely would not have seen the same price spike.
Communities could lose millions of dollars in economic benefits
The Trump administration’s offshore wind freeze threatens more than higher bills; it puts millions of dollars in lost wages and revenue at risk too. For example, union workers on the Revolution Wind project alone would have lost $28 million in wages and benefits if construction never resumed. As for the four projects that are not yet operational, the freeze could cause more than 300 permanent jobs to never materialize.
Beyond depriving workers of jobs and pay, the freeze jeopardizes funding for states through tax revenue and other economic benefits. Developers project billions of dollars in total economic benefits from a single project—including hundreds of millions in compensation for workers on New York’s Sunrise Wind project and millions in annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth for Rhode Island from the Revolution Wind project—but the Trump administration’s attacks on offshore wind endanger these financial gains. If the targeted projects are canceled, communities that were supposed to receive more than $400 million in tax revenue would not get the majority of that funding. For example, Brookhaven, New York, is expecting $164 million from Sunrise Wind for the town and Industrial Development Authority, dependent on operation of the project. These tangible economic benefits are only a fraction of what communities could lose if the Trump administration’s actions force the cancellation of these projects.
The Trump administration’s offshore wind freeze endangers grid reliability
The Trump administration’s offshore wind freeze risks energy reliability for the roughly 100 million people living in the affected jurisdictions. The affected grid operators—Independent System Operator New England (ISO-NE), New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), and PJM—supply power to 20 states and Washington, D.C., across the Northeast, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic regions, and all three are counting on power from the targeted projects. The five projects the Trump administration is targeting could each provide a minimum of 700 megawatts (MW) of power for a total of 5.8 gigawatts (GW), enough to power more than 2 million homes.
The affected projects have been in development for years, and the grid operators have already included them in the intensive planning required to meet electricity demand for their region. Two of the affected grid operators have already stated that the freeze threatens electricity reliability for their area. The projects are close to completing construction, with one project already sending power to the grid and the other four scheduled to start delivering power this year. This makes it implausible and uneconomical for brand new projects to make up for this potential gap in energy supply in the same time frame.
Conclusion
The Trump administration risks forcing ratepayers to pay almost $100 more on their utility bills every year for the next decade with its most recent attack on offshore wind. The freeze threatens residents with more than just higher bills, however, as it throws into question hundreds of jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars in additional financial investment, and a reliable supply of electricity. This attack on offshore wind may be the most recent and one of the most tangible, but it is far from the Trump administration’s only attack on clean energy. Still, this attack alone puts millions of Americans at risk of higher electricity prices, and the threat it and future attacks pose is far from over.
Methodology
Annual cost per customer
The total cost to ratepayers if the five frozen offshore wind projects were canceled would be $45 billion over the next 10 years. The ratepayers that stand to be affected by this price increase are the customers of the three affected grid operators (ISO-NE, NYISO, and PJM). To determine the average cost to an individual customer, the total cost to all ratepayers ($45 billion) was divided by the total number of ratepayers (47,336,527) across sectors in the states listed in the analysis from the American Clean Power Association.
Permanent jobs
The author calculated the number of permanent jobs at risk from the Trump administration’s offshore wind freeze by totaling the number of operations and maintenance jobs for each of the four projects that are not yet operational:
Cost to ratepayers from delay to Revolution Wind
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection estimated, for the length of the freeze on Revolution Wind, a cost of $350,000 per day in impacts to ratepayers. The freeze on Revolution Wind lasted 20 days from the date the stop work order was issued until the day the preliminary injunction was granted, excluding the days the freeze was implemented and lifted. Comparable data for three out of five projects were not found; therefore, only data on Vineyard Wind 1 and Revolution Wind were included.
The author would like to thank Kat So, Kendra Hughes, Jenny Rowland-Shea, Anh Nguyen, Bill Rapp, Akshay Thyagarajan, Devon Lespier, Mona Alsaidi, Bianca Serbin, and Meghan Miller for their contributions.