Trump vows to trash wind energy

The duel over US energy sources between current president Joe Biden and president-elect Donald Trump continues with wind power stocks dropping after Trump called turbines ‘garbage’ during a speech in Mar-a-Lago.

Trump, whose inauguration is set for January 20, spoke in length against wind power and stated that the US will have a policy “where no windmills are being built” during his presidency.

He called wind “the most expensive energy there is” and claimed that wind turbines were a “disaster.”

“They litter our country, they’re littered all over our country like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field. They’re rusting, rotting, closed, and falling down. And they put new ones next to them because nobody wants to take them down, because why should they take them down? It’s very expensive to take them down,” Trump said during his speech.

This resulted in stocks of Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas and compatriot wind developer Ørsted falling around 7% on Wednesday following Trump’s anti-wind tirade. Siemens Energy, RWE, and Nordex also saw a drop in stock value.

Last Friday, Trump called for the UK to dismantle its wind turbines in the North Sea in response to a decision by the US firm Apache to leave the oil-rich region due to a windfall tax on oil operations.

“The UK is making a very big mistake. Open up the North Sea. Get rid of the windmills!” Trump posted on his Truth Social online platform.

Trump was not an advocate of environmental protection or green energy at any point. Famously, or infamously, he even pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate change accord. Joe Biden reversed that decision after he took office.

The president-elect has had a bone to pick with wind even before his first run in office. It all stems from his fight against the Aberdeen Bay offshore wind farm which he tried to stop by claiming it would ruin the view from his golf resort in Aberdeen. He lost the court case in 2015 and the offshore wind farm started operation in 2018.

This fight against wind so close to Trump’s inauguration could be seen as round two between the presidents as Biden dealt a heavy blow to Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” oil policy by blocking all future oil and gas drilling in more than 2.5m sq km of federal waters earlier this week.

With this decision, federal oil and gas leasing was banned across large parts of the Atlantic, Pacific, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Northern Bering Sea. In total, the ban closed off an area equal to around a quarter of the total land mass of the United States.