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Michael Thomas: Trump’s Latest Policy Could Threaten Every Wind Project in America
President Trump has been a vocal opponent of wind energy for more than a decade. But up until recently, his policies have never matched his rhetoric.
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Shortly before he took office in January, Trump told reporters in Mar-a-Lago that his second administration would take a very different approach to wind energy. “We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” he said.
The growth of wind energy and the legal guardrails that should make such policy impossible made it easy to dismiss this early warning sign. Since then, it’s become clear that the administration is willing to break laws and pursue unprecedented policies to stop wind energy development entirely.
A new escalation that could threaten every wind project
This week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman broke a story about the administration’s latest attack on wind energy:
The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
A 1.2-mile setback in a country with as many highways and railroads as ours would restrict development on a huge swatch of the country’s land. But it was a single sentence buried in the same release that signaled a threat that could be much larger.
DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
