American president Donald Trump’s war on renewables has claimed two more scalps, including a hugely successful renewable energy mandate in Arizona and an already approved offshore wind farm off the coast of Maryland and Delaware.
According to a report from Reuters, the Trump administration is seeking to vacate approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was granted by the previous Biden administration in September of 2024.
The proposed offshore project, which would have been located off the coast of Maryland and Delaware, was planned to be built in three phases with an eventual total capacity of over 2 gigawatts (GW).
The latest developments follow Trump’s announcement that construction of a nearly complete offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut.
But it is not just wind that is the subject of Trump and Republican ire. Trump has canned a multi-billion scheme that helps farmers install solar on their properties, while in Arizona local authorities have scrapped that state’ renewable energy mandates.
Trump has long raged against wind and solar, repeating baseless misinformation and outright disinformation, ranging from the 2023 claim that wind turbine noise causes cancer and offshore wind farms kill whales.
In a recent post on his social media site Truth Social, Trump declared in his usual chaotic expostulation of capitalisation and punctuation that “Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS.”
“THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY! We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” the president of the United States said.
This particular claim will likely come as a surprise to the nation’s electricity utilities, with the most recent data from Lazard confirming that solar and onshore wind are the least expensive and quickest power generation sources to deploy in the United States – and that, even without government subsidies.
Facts such as these, however, have long been surplus to requirements in the Trump White House, which is instead paving the way for Republicans around the country to fight back against the clean energy transition, including by repealing and dismantle policies.
Case in point is the decision earlier this month by the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), the state’s public utilities commission, to begin repealing the Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST) Rules.
Passed and enacted back in 2006, the REST rules required Arizonan electric utilities to generate at least 15 per cent of their energy from renewable energy resources by 2025. At least a third of that had to come from the sun, and Arizona has a lot of it.
Yhe Guinness World Records has declared that Arizona has the “most sunshine” on the planet, and renewable energy has already grown to account for 20 per cent of Arizona’s total net generation (in 2024, according to the US government’s own Energy Information Administration).
Nevertheless, claiming that the REST rules were “outdated”, ACC vice chair Nick Myers declared without citing any evidence that such renewable energy mandates “have unnecessarily driven up costs for customers.”
“Utilities should have the flexibility to choose the most cost-effective energy mix to deliver reliable, affordable service—without being burdened by government-imposed rules that ultimately increase costs for customers,” Myers added.
APS, Arizona’s largest electric utility, announced earlier this month that it was backing down from its previous “aspirational ‘zero-carbon’ approach” and adopting an “aspirational ‘carbon-neutral’ approach” that also eliminates interim targets and opens the door for APS to utilise fossil fuel sources.
It announced on the same day a new fossil gas pipeline to transport gas from West Texas to Arizona by late 2029.
