Has Trump ended Staten Island’s wind power dreams?

For over a decade, New York has worked to bring wind power jobs to Staten Island as part of an ambitious plan to establish the state as the biggest hub of offshore wind. A centerpiece of the effort, situated in the southwest of the island, is the Arthur Kill Terminal (AKT), an envisioned staging and assembly port.

But on Friday, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation rescinded a 2022 $48 million grant supporting the project that had been funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The news comes after President Trump’s first day memorandum dismantling federal backing for wind energy had already placed the project in permit purgatory, halting the Republican-leaning borough’s push into the offshore wind industry. 

Boone Davis, president of AKT, began planning for the assembly plant in 2018. He’s no stranger to regulatory barriers hindering wind power; while he worked as a consultant on the Block Island Wind Farm, which opened in Rhode Island waters in 2016 as the country’s first offshore commercial windfarm, he also helped manage the Cape Wind Project in Massachusetts, which, after years of permitting and lease issues, was never built. 

Davis spotted this plot of shoreline on the Arthur Kill strait—the phrase is an English version of the Dutch words for back channel—that splits Staten Island from New Jersey. This slice of New York’s harbor has been used for industrial purposes as far back as the 18th century. Today, a major part of its appeal is that it sits on the ocean side of the road spanning Outerbridge Crossing, allowing the site’s users to assemble tall turbines and get them out to sea.

The construction of the facility would create 600 jobs, according to Charles Dougherty, AKT’s chief commercial officer, and once up and running, manufacturing work would sustain 100 to 150 jobs, all union. The project would also add nearly $400 billion in “direct economic impact” according to Empire State Development. 

When Trump reentered the White House, the project faced just one final federal hurdle, a public notice period on the terminal’s Army Corps of Engineers permits, to inch closer to breaking ground on AKT’s manufacturing and assembly plant. But Trump’s memorandum promptly halted all off-shore wind energy efforts, pausing the facility’s development.

Arthur Kill Terminal is not alone. Across the nation, wind energy is in a bardo state—stuck between alive and dead—as industry players navigate Trump’s memorandum that withdrew most federal support for any project with “the purposes of generation of electricity or any other such use derived from the use of wind.” 

In May, New York, alongside 16 other states and D.C., went to a Massachusetts federal court to argue Trump’s memorandum was illegal. Their complaint cites the holdup at Arthur Kill Terminal as an example of how the memorandum has damaged the supply chain supporting offshore wind. So far, the administration has avoided providing the court basic information about how the Interior Department and other relevant agencies operationalized Trump’s memo. The next hearing is later today.

The case docket includes filings from community groups in waterfront areas claiming wind projects will cause harm. According to research from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab, many of the groups have financial or organizational links to climate denying think tanks backed by the fossil fuel industry. Save Long Beach Island, a group based on New Jersey’s Atlantic Coast, told the court that rising offshore wind energy activity is killing whales, an assertion refuted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but one that was nonetheless put forward last week by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a televised cabinet meeting. The Brown report found over $72 million in donations from the Koch brothers and other pro-fossil fuel donors had helped fund this misinformation campaign. 

In late July, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management placed a new hurdle ahead of developing offshore wind energy, rescinding designated wind energy areas on the outer continental shelf—including on the New York Bight, where AKT was anticipated to support windmill installations. 

The Biden administration’s clean energy efforts had called for the country to get 30 gigawatts from offshore wind by 2030. New York state planned to produce over 10 percent of that figure, or enough to power 6 million homes by 2035. Its own state-level climate goals call for sourcing 70 percent of energy from renewables by the end of this decade. 

Bringing wind power to Staten Island, which has only voted for a Democrat presidential candidate four times in history, used to be a bipartisan project. Staten Island’s GOP representative, Nicole Malliotakis, has supported AKT, while boasting of the economic and environmental benefits of expanding wind power facilities in her district. She voted for Biden’s infrastructure package, and on Earth Day 2022 introduced legislation to create a program to share federal offshore wind revenue with states. In April, despite Trump’s order halting offshore wind development, Rep. Malliotakis petitioned the Army Corp of Engineers to nonetheless expedite the remaining federal permit for AKT. Her office did not respond to a request for comment, but after the Department of Transportation announced on Friday that it would pull its financial support of the terminal, Malliotakis told the Staten Island Advance she would push the agency “to get the funding repurposed to another maritime, port infrastructure or economic development project that would benefit Staten Island.”

Beyond investments in infrastructure, local officials also worked to build the island’s workforce. Beginning in 2023, New York City’s Economic Development Corporation gave over half a million to the College of Staten Island to “train the next generation of professionals for offshore wind careers.” The day before the 2024 election, AKT provided the college another $1 million to develop a future offshore wind industry workforce. 

In the past, Staten Island has been left behind from growth opportunities that benefited other parts of New York City, says Nadia Adam, president of the Staten Island Industrial Alliance. She attributes this to the GOP-voting borough being “isolated physically and ideologically” from the rest of the city. That context has made some residents hesitant to wholeheartedly welcome offshore wind. 

“People are unsure where Staten Island fits in, and they want to make sure we’re not being a dumping ground, because that’s what we have been historically for the rest of New York City,” says Adam, in a nod to the borough’s infamous Fresh Kills landfill, now being converted into a park. 

But Staten Island’s maritime history has primed the borough for offshore wind, says Adam, who is also a co-founder of EcoWind Solutions, which offers legal and regulatory guidance to wind power companies. For decades, the island has served as both an industrial and maritime corridor, and already hosts a high volume cargo port. 

Other wind power projects in New York have seen some movement. In May, the Trump administration reversed a stop work order it had issued for Empire Wind, a project off Long Island and tied into Brooklyn, following several calls with New York Governor Kathy Hochul and additional advocacy from environmental groups. 

One such organization, the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, joined the 17-state plaintiff team in May, claiming Trump’s anti-wind memorandum is causing “irreparable harm” to their members. 

“It’s impacting not only the state of New York for our own policy goals, but also there’s a lot of money invested in this industry already, and these companies can’t take the hit,” says Alicia Gené Artessa, the alliance’s offshore wind director. “The state of New York has also invested a lot of time and money, and then everyone else connected to it” has too.

If Trump gets his way, she explains, “It would just be totally squandered.”