Trump again knocks wind energy, subsidies

It was a little after 11 o’clock Tuesday morning when Gov. Maura Healey said on GBH Radio that she hoped President-elect Donald Trump would not do much that would disrupt Massachusetts’ pursuit of clean energy.

An hour later, Trump put that notion to rest when he doubled down on his intention of setting “a policy where no windmills are being built” and pointed a finger at Massachusetts during a press conference in Florida. 

“They’re dangerous. You see what’s happening up in the Massachusetts area with the whales, where they had two whales wash ashore in, I think, a 17-year period and now they had 14 this season. The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” Trump said as he opposed both onshore and offshore wind generation as costly, polluting and harmful to the environment.

There has been an “unprecedented” number of whale strandings along the south shore of Massachusetts, between Weymouth and Plymouth, this year, officials from the Plymouth-based nonprofit Whale and Dolphin Conservation said in late December. However, the group voiced skepticism about claims attributing the strandings to offshore wind.

“We are well aware of social media campaigns which attribute these mortalities to offshore wind development, but, at least in our response area, there are no wind surveys or construction activities taking place,” Regina Asmutis-Silvia, WDC’s executive director, said in a press release in late December. “Our goal is to use the outcomes of these cases to help save other whales. It is beyond frustrating to have the integrity of our team challenged if our findings don’t coincide with someone’s political agenda.”

WDC suggested that “a notable increase of forage fish closer to the coast of Massachusetts” in recent years “has brought whales nearer to shoreline where the chances of finding animals who were entangled, struck, or sick, has risen.”

A female humpback whale washed up on Rexhame Beach in Marshfield the day after Christmas, the group said — the sixth large whale carcass to wash up between Weymouth and Plymouth since July.

An official from the group Green Oceans, which is critical of offshore wind, told WJAR last week that the juvenile humpback whale that was stranded along Richmond Pond Beach in Westport was “the 13th whale that has washed up dead in the past three weeks from Massachusetts to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.”

Since 2016, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared several “unusual mortality events” for large whales along the east coast of the U.S., noting an increase in strandings of humpback, minke and North Atlantic right whales. 

NOAA said examinations indicate the primary causes of death are accidental entanglements in fishing gear, vessel strikes or infectious disease, and that “[t]here are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”

Massachusetts is relying heavily on the potential of offshore wind power generation to reduce carbon emissions as required by state law, but it’s been mostly choppy waters for the sector recently.

“This is where we need to go — not only as a state, as a country, as a world —  this is where the investments are. We need to move away from fossil fuels. And, obviously, we’ve made a huge play for that here in Massachusetts. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done,” Healey said Tuesday morning on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio.”

Vineyard Wind 1, the project being built south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket that had to pause construction in July when a blade shattered and littered the ocean, is the only project Massachusetts has under construction. That project missed its own end-of-2023 target for starting power generation and ramped up to a few megawatts of its 800-MW potential before shutting down in the wake of the blade incident.

The Light’s boat trip to the lease area on Nov. 20 showed that only a third of the planned 62 turbines had been completed, while the other two-thirds needed work. About 30 towers were up, but about 10 lacked blades. Vineyard Wind did complete the last of 62 turbine foundations late in 2024, the Light reported last week.

A project spokesman has not responded to repeated inquiries about the resumption of power production from the beleaguered project.

Experts are uncertain about how much impact the second Trump administration could have on offshore wind projects well underway, but they have speculated that projects less far along could face greater risk.

The Healey administration picked some or all of three separate offshore wind projects in the state’s latest procurement round, totaling more than 2,600 MW of capacity. But almost a third of that was wiped away late last month when Vineyard Offshore pulled the 800 MW that Massachusetts had selected from its Vineyard Wind 2 project back from contract negotiations, saying the deal was conditional on Connecticut buying the remaining capacity.

And once project pricing details are made public, the costs are expected to be significantly higher than what was called for under previous contracts that developers canceled as projects became less financially attractive.

“Nobody wants them, and they’re very expensive,” Trump said Tuesday about turbines. “They don’t work without subsidy. You don’t want energy that needs subsidy. Energy is a good business. You don’t need subsidy.”

On GBH, Healey pointed out that clean energy projects are under development in Massachusetts as well as “red states” and expressed a hope that Trump will not upset that work.

“This shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue. It’s about, first off, American energy independence, about energy resilience and making sure that we actually have enough energy sources coming in to meet our needs across the states,” the governor said. “And it’s something that really applies across all states. So I hope that it won’t be politicized.”

The former attorney general gave GBH something of a job description Tuesday, describing how she plans to approach the second Trump administration from the Corner Office after being a regular Trump administration antagonist during her time as AG.

“My philosophy as governor is, I’m here to work for the people of Massachusetts, to support our residents, to grow our economy, and I’ll work with the administration where we can work together, and I’ll certainly be prepared to stand up and defend Massachusetts interests as we need to going forward,” she said. “I was attorney general during the Trump years, and sued him, along with a number of AGs, a number of times — well over 100 times and we won the vast majority of those cases. So I know something about defending and protecting Massachusetts interests. But I think it’s a matter of being prepared for what the new administration might bring, and also staying laser focused on the work that we’ve got to do here in Massachusetts.”

New Bedford Light staff contributed to this report.