There is a principle in law that says someone intends the natural result of their actions. You cannot throw me out a window and say you didn’t mean for me to get hurt.
By the same principle, if you block new solar and wind generation, you can’t say you didn’t intend to throttle energy production.
President Trump has made it clear he wants to kill wind and solar, and his appointees have followed through. The Department of Interior is refusing leases and permits to wind and solar projects, even as it moves ahead on lease sales for oil and gas drilling.
Interior even issued a stop-work order on an offshore wind farm that is 80% complete. The project was on track to supply enough energy for 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, until the Trump administration stepped in. A judge later lifted the order, but not before the company building the project saw its share price drop to a record low.
Reducing the amount of low-cost, clean electricity developers can add to the grid will have an enormous impact. Clean energy is so much less expensive and faster to build than fossils fuels that renewable energy and batteries made up over 90% of the energy capacity added in the U.S. last year.
It’s fortunate for consumers that Trump won’t be able to stop all wind and solar projects, because the small number of fossil fuel plants under development won’t fill the gap. It takes years to develop a new gas plant, and gas turbines face an order backlog of up to 7 years.
The shortfall in new generation is happening at a time when the use of electricity is surging, mainly due to demand from data centers. Other customers, including ordinary residents, now have to compete with data centers for increasingly expensive electricity. Rates are going up as a result, and grid operators warn we may soon face power shortages.
Trump’s only concession to the power crunch is to order a few fossil fuel plants to stay open that their owners had planned to close for economic reasons. Ordering an uneconomic plant to stay open means someone loses money. Trump hasn’t offered federal dollars to pay the difference. The utilities that own the plants will pass the cost on to consumers.
If throttling energy production and raising energy costs is the natural result of Trump’s actions, it’s reasonable to assume that’s his intent. So many experts have pointed out the damage his policy will do that the alternative explanation – that the president is deluded and foolishly thinks his actions will somehow result in more energy production and lower costs – doesn’t hold up.
But why would the president deliberately hamstring American energy production and raise electricity costs for consumers?
Because that’s the deal he made with oil and gas industry leaders at a closed-door fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago last year, in exchange for the more than $200 million the industry spent to get him elected. Actually, Trump asked for a billion dollars, and in return promised to dismantle environmental regulations, go after the wind industry and scrap President Biden’s policies promoting electric vehicles.
At a later fundraiser, he also promised to approve new natural gas exports, in spite of warnings from critics that these exports would drive U.S. prices higher – which is exactly what happened.
Promises made, promises kept, as Trump’s fans like to say. Trump’s appointees have gutted environmental protections and done their best to keep wind and solar off the grid. Most people know the “One Big Beautiful Bill” revoked tax incentives for homes and businesses to install solar; less widely reported is that it included $18 billion in tax incentives for the oil and gas industry and lowered the amounts the industry must pay to lease federal lands for drilling, among other rewards.
Less renewable energy and higher prices means more market share and higher profits for fossil fuels. The natural result is that the American consumer will have to pay through the nose for energy.
Too bad, folks, but that was the deal.
This article was originally published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on September 30, 2025.
Power for the People VA 
The cost of off shore wind is about three times other sources: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf Solar is indeed quite inexpensive and its price is still dropping. However solar raises the cost of thermal power (e.g. gas). The reason is very simple, any time you let a thermal plant cool (e.g. because solar becomes available) energy is wasted as the plant cools. When the thermal plant is warmed back up (e.g. because solar goes away) there is energy loss. Thermal plants have very good efficiency and low cost when they run continuously.
Meanwhile Oersted stock has been sinking since the end of 2020 as their European offshore wind projects are being canceled. Even the Europeans are starting to see the foolishness of offshore wind as those wind farms age prematurely.
The bottom line is the ultimate solution to electricity will be combination of solar and batteries, new tech to be invented, and some onshore wind where it is cheap (e.g. the Great Plains). Battery cost is not there yet but will be. But everything else, including fossil, will cost more and be abandoned. Premature deployment will be costly and the dead end of offshore wind will be very costly. It’s long past time to end the zealotry (both pro and anti-fossil) and the global warming alarmism and accept reality.
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