Why is Trump paying to stop wind farms?

**Jason Grume** (0:01)
N-P-R.

**Wailin Wong** (0:06)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Wayland Wong, here with Friend of the Show and host of the public radio podcast Outside In, Nate Hedgie. Hey, Nate.

**Darian Woods** (0:15)
Hey, Wayland, it's great to be back.

**Wailin Wong** (0:17)
What do you got today?

**Darian Woods** (0:18)
First, I've got a question for you. If the government doesn't want more of something, what does it normally do?

**Wailin Wong** (0:25)
Pass a law against it, like a ban or a moratorium?

**Darian Woods** (0:27)
Yeah, exactly. Remember Biden putting a moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling, or when former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg banned big sodas? You remember that?

**Wailin Wong** (0:37)
Oh yeah, I wasn't living there at the time, but it was national news. Did it end up sticking?

**Darian Woods** (0:41)
No, it did not. I looked it up recently. Did not stick. Did not stick.
Well, anyways, Trump has been doing something unusual. Instead of bans and moratoriums, he is opening the checkbook. His administration will be paying energy firms billions of dollars to completely walk away from wind farms. The latest casualty is a proposed offshore wind farm in North Carolina. US company Duke Energy agreed to a hundred and twenty nine million dollar buyout from the White House to abandon its plans to build it.

**Wailin Wong** (1:12)
Today on the show, why is the federal government paying companies to not build things? And what does it mean for our energy bills? Stay tuned.
President Trump's beef with wind farms is personal. It goes back nearly two decades to when he began building what he called the world's greatest golf course in Scotland.

**Darian Woods** (1:36)
But there were also plans to build an offshore wind farm nearby, and Trump was not happy. Mainly because he thought they would ruin the view. And he still hates the way they look today. Last summer, when he was visiting Europe, he said this to reporters.

**Donald Trump** (1:49)
Stop the windmills. You're ruining your countries. I really mean it. It's so sad. You fly over and you see these windmills all over the place, ruining your beautiful fields and valleys, and killing your birds, and if they're stuck in the ocean, ruining your oceans.

**Severin Borenstein** (2:06)
He has, from the very beginning of his political life, railed against wind power in general, saying many things that aren't true, and many things that have a grain of truth.

**Wailin Wong** (2:18)
That's Severin Borenstein. He's the faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He points out that wind farms do have some environmental impacts.

**Severin Borenstein** (2:28)
They bother some people. They have killed birds.
When you put that in the context of what most other energy sources do, it's pretty minimal.

**Darian Woods** (2:39)
I should also say that they are a problem for bats, too.

**Wailin Wong** (2:42)
Bats? I thought bats just were in their caves all the time.

**Darian Woods** (2:45)
No, no, they're flying around getting hit by windmills.

**Wailin Wong** (2:47)
Like the wind, is it like they can't detect where the windmills are?

**Darian Woods** (2:51)
That's such a great question.

**Wailin Wong** (2:53)
I'm so concerned about bats. Okay, I gotta put a pin in this, otherwise we'll never finish this episode.
Since President Trump got back into office last year, his administration has tried a few aggressive tactics to stop new wind farms. First, there was an executive order halting permits for new wind farms on federal lands and waters. That was shot down by the courts in December.

**Darian Woods** (3:13)
The administration also tried halting new projects citing national security concerns. They've made an argument that the farms interfere with military radar. But...

**Severin Borenstein** (3:22)
There really isn't much evidence supporting those claims, and judges, when faced with those claims, have generally rejected them. So they haven't been very successful in making a real case that there's a problem.

**Wailin Wong** (3:35)
In fact, wind farms have been operating across Europe and Asia for decades with no significant problems. So none of this was really working until the Trump administration found a workaround, opening the checkbook. It is agreed to spend more than $2.7 billion to buy out and cancel nine large offshore wind leases. The leases were originally awarded by the Biden administration back in 2022

**Darian Woods** (4:00)
None of these wind farms were actively being built when Trump offered the money. Instead, his administration was buying back the rights to build those farms on sections of federal waters. While many of the companies are getting a full reimbursement for what they paid for the leases, a couple aren't.