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As the Trump administration wages a high-profile attack on the nation’s offshore wind farms, it has also been quietly fighting a brutal battle with renewable energy projects on land.
Since President Donald Trump took office nearly a year ago, his administration has announced at least two dozen policy and regulatory actions aimed at hindering the build-out of wind and solar projects, including rescinding federal tax credits, withdrawing grants and loans, and freezing permitting approvals. Yet one measure in particular has had an outsize chilling effect — and is facing a new legal challenge from clean energy groups.
Last summer, the U.S. Interior Department announced that all decisions related to wind and solar projects would require an “elevated review” by Secretary Doug Burgum, saying this would end the Biden administration’s “preferential treatment” for renewables. In a July memo, the agency listed nearly 70 types of permits and other actions that now need Burgum’s personal sign-off, adding cost and time and creating significant anxiety for developers, experts say.
Over 22 gigawatts of utility-scale wind and solar projects on public lands have been canceled or are held up as a result of the order, according to Wood Mackenzie data and the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management website. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 16.5 million U.S. homes — a significant amount at any point, but especially when the country is clamoring for more low-cost electricity as energy demand and utility bills soar.
“We’re seeing electricity costs go up all around the country, and the cheapest electrons that we can put into the supply side of that equation are all stuck on Secretary Burgum’s desk,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Canary Media.
Solar represents the bulk of that figure, with 18 GW of facilities scrapped or considered inactive as of December, by Wood Mackenzie’s count. Nearly 90% of those projects also included energy storage, given that many were slated for desert regions in the Southwest, said Kaitlin Fung, a research analyst for the consultancy.
“It’s created a choke point,” Fung said of Interior’s memo. She noted that the Bureau of Land Management has advanced permits for only one renewable energy project since July: the 700-megawatt Libra Solar facility in Nevada. Meanwhile, federal oil and gas permits have surged in the first year of Trump’s term.
Many other projects remain stuck in permitting limbo as developers await the approvals they need — from quick consultations to complex reviews — in order to secure financing and begin building their large-scale renewable energy installations. That’s true for wind and solar farms on private and state lands as well, since those projects might require federal approval for things like wildlife and waterway impacts.
The holdups are occurring as the United States teeters on the edge of an electricity crisis. Demand is climbing across the nation, causing household utility bills to soar, and more power plants are needed to satisfy the surge in AI data centers, factories, and electrified cars and buildings. Large-scale solar and onshore wind projects are among the fastest and lowest-cost ways to add power to the grid — faster than Trump’s preferred path of building new gas-fired power plants or restarting shuttered nuclear reactors.
Heinrich, the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, cited the gigawatts of stalled projects in a Senate floor speech earlier this month. He and other Democratic leaders have said that any efforts to pass bipartisan legislation on energy permitting reform are “dead in the water” so long as the Trump administration continues to block development of onshore wind and solar and cancel fully permitted offshore wind farms.
“The concern is that we put a balanced legislative package together that gives certainty to both traditional [oil and gas] energy and renewables — but if this administration is going to say yes to all of the fossil projects and create a de facto moratorium on all of the renewable and storage projects, then we haven’t accomplished anything,” Heinrich said by phone.
In recent weeks, a coalition of clean energy organizations sued to overturn the July memo and other actions from Interior and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits for energy projects near navigable waters. Both the Army Corps and Interior say they’re prioritizing projects that generate the most energy per acre, a measure that favors coal, oil, and gas and undercuts renewables — and which has its roots in fossil-fuel industry misinformation.
Such actions “arbitrarily and discriminatorily place wind and solar technologies into a second-class status compared to other energy sources,” the groups said in a statement this week. “The Trump administration has choked private developers’ ability to build new and urgently needed energy projects across the nation.”
For solar and storage in particular, nearly 520 proposed projects totaling 117 GW of capacity have yet to receive all the necessary federal, state, and local permits, which puts them at risk of being delayed by the Trump administration, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The projects represent half of the country’s new planned power capacity.
Many developers are simply receiving radio silence from agencies whose approval or advice they need, said Ben Norris, SEIA’s vice president of regulatory affairs, who likened the agencies’ actions to a “blockade on solar permits.” Fung noted one mundane but significant effect of Interior’s memo: Wind and solar developers are now excluded from using an online government planning tool that helps streamline environmental reviews, a move that creates additional costs and complexity for companies.
The delays come as developers are racing to qualify for federal tax credits under the newly shortened timelines. Wind and solar installations must either start construction this summer or be operating by the end of 2027 to access incentives. “Time is really of the essence for many of these projects,” Norris said. In the absence of Congress passing a permitting-reform bill, he added, the Trump administration could simply remove many of the roadblocks it created by revoking its memos and other actions.
“If they were really serious about affordability and addressing power bills, they could take these steps today,” he said.
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