As 2025 draws to a close, I had to catch up on December's wind industry news. It's as dreary for them as last January's had been, capped by a hostile Trump administration fixin' to take office.
Twenty days later, it was a real case of 'let the games begin' as the new president paused all permitting for wind developments, including pulling all the leases for offshore wind farms, which began a legal and diplomatic tussle that continues to this moment.
Trump Signs Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects
— Wake Up NJ 🇺🇸 New Jersey (@wakeupnj) January 21, 2025
This is fantastic news 👏 https://t.co/BXuWwgvV9a pic.twitter.com/VZFF6HY5xN
There's been some back-and-forth, temporary victories and losses in the courts...
Dominion filed a federal lawsuit after leases were suspended for five offshore wind projects. The pause is causing more than $5 million/day in losses in vessel costs along with additional expenses tied to idle crews and stored equipment.#energy #policyhttps://t.co/ihQQ9suycQ pic.twitter.com/ZV1ViNdJlV
— KEN YAGELSKI (@yagelski) December 25, 2025
...fits and the occasional project restart. But when you smooth the graph for noise, steady progress has been made in reversing the mad dash to turbines on every hilltop and wave cap.
Besides the Trump dogged determination to scrape the wind industry from its artificial and expensive prominence in the plans of the cult-led Biden energy department, the wind industry itself has been doing its damnedest to vindicate the doubters and skeptics who have long derided it as nothing more than ruinous fantasy.
2025 was a banner year for proving the lie that wind is a cheaper, more reliable renewable energy option than fossil fuels.
For one thing, the 'more is better' has been handily disproven through multiple studies, and now the threat of actual litigation for, of all things, wind theft from 'wake loss.'
Too many turbines spoil the broth, if you will.
In March, one of my favorite industry archvillains, the Danish juggernaut developer Orsted, found that other windfarms operating near its Irish Sea 'Vattenfall' project were stealing their thunderous breezes and reducing the electricity, aka profits, of the Orsted farm.
...Orsted believes ‘catastrophic wake losses’ threaten the existence of their Irish Sea wind farms, claiming that wakes from EnBW, BP, and RWE projects could shorten the life of Orsted’s assets. Note that wind wakes can stretch as far as 100 km.
Orsted claims that four nearby wind farms in the Irish Sea could result in a drop in Orsted’s annual energy production of up to 5.34%, and is seeking mitigation or compensation.
'New research' says wind wakes stretch how far?
As the push for renewable energy accelerates, offshore wind farms have emerged as pivotal players in the quest for sustainable power. However, a critical challenge has surfaced that threatens the viability of these ambitious projects: wind turbine wakes. These phenomena—defined as regions of reduced wind speed downstream from turbines—have long been underestimated, particularly in offshore environments. Experts fear that wake effects could lead to power deficits greater than 15% for upcoming wind farms along the US East Coast. A recent study by researchers at NREL and the University of Colorado estimated that internal wake losses could approach 30% in certain severe cases. In this blog, we will delve into the implications of these findings, highlight the inadequacies of current wake modeling practices, and highlight innovative solutions like WindESCo's Swarm™ technology, which aims to mitigate wake effects through advanced turbine control strategies. As we unravel these complexities, we will consider how the future of offshore energy hinges on our ability to understand and address the hidden costs of wind turbine wakes.
Wind turbine wakes and their negative effects have been significantly underestimated for offshore wind farms. These losses along with margin pressure from, e.g., inflation, the supply chain, etc., have many in the industry concerned about pending project viability. Just this past year, the utility giant Avangrid canceled their Park City Wind Contract, agreeing to pay $16M in penalties after suggesting the project was “unfinanceable”. Avangrid is not alone, Ørsted recently ceased development of Ocean Wind I and 2 due to macroeconomic factors while RWE has canceled plans for Community Offshore Wind due to technical and commercial complexities. Additionally, there are growing concerns surrounding “wind theft” or “external wake losses”, which is the negative wake effect of one wind farm on another. The same study referenced above for internal wake losses estimates that external wake losses could be as significant as 15% for some wind farms located along the US East Coast. The UK recently released a landmark decision blocking the construction of the Awel y Mor wind farm until its developer, RWE, could thoroughly assess wake impacts on neighboring wind farms.
You'll notice how often in this recent article - November 2025 - the word 'underestimated' pops up - like a buttload. Followed shortly by 'inadequacies' in testing models, and pretty much a plain admission of 'We just didn't get around to checking on that before we jumped into this.' As they admit the overabundance of turbines and these massive wakes, once these farms are already in situ, as many of them are, make the projects 'unviable.'
And the energy yields have been wildly overestimated?
New research suggests offshore wind turbines “steal” wind from each other, meaning projected energy yields may be greatly overestimated in national plans. If so, what does this mean for current energy transition targets and costs? Read the article 👇https://t.co/Q33K2Xgexv pic.twitter.com/WbtdONiaVz
— CLINTEL.ORG (@ClintelOrg) December 30, 2025
Oh. Do tell. That's only like the tell in every snake-oil scheme ever.
In what other industry could you destroy vast miles of land and sea without every i dotted and t crossed? Only in an industry underwritten by massive expenditures of federal tax dollars.
Questions aplenty remain - who takes the bad windfarm, the 'unviable' windfarm, down? Or the few towers that were already assembled, with hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete already poured on the ocean bed?
OOPS
In the meantime, oh, gosh - now, they want to move from 'simple modeling' to 'real-time data.'
Fantastic.
Hard no.
As for the cheaper aspect of these renewables, it's all been such a scam. 2025 has seen more and more of the public become aware of exactly how they have been hosed by the climate cult and Green gifters selling the energy transition fever dream.
In the United Kingdom, those poor souls paid a fortune to the wind companies for electricity they couldn't use or when they needed more in specific areas, because that's part of the deal with the green devil you must make.
BRITAIN shelled out almost £1.5billion to turn off wind farms and fire up gas plants this year when the electric grid could not cope.
The bill, recovered through levies on household and business energy tariffs, is about a fifth higher than in 2024 as wind capacity increases faster than the cables needed for it.
The National Energy System Operator, which replaced the National Grid in balancing supply and demand, pays wind farms in remote areas to stop generating if transmission lines are full, then buys power closer to where it is needed.
Figures from Octopus Energy’s Wasted Wind tracker show total “constraint” costs rose from £1.23billion to £1.46billion.
Payments to wind farms dipped from £395million to £380million but the cost of replacing lost renewable output — usually with gas — jumped from £835million to £1.08billion.
Think that's awful? Guess what they're anticipating the cost will jump to in just 4 years.
...Octopus — the UK’s biggest energy supplier — said costs could hit £8billion a year by 2030 without reform and said the system is “broken”.
The 'system' is not broken. The British ratepayer is broken.
In the US, those who have blue state governments intent on wind will soon be feeling the same effect.
As for those greener, renewable windmills themselves, they've covered themselves in glory all year.
In March, turbines were toppling like Weebles at a Missouri wind farm.
News that multiple Vestas turbine collapses had forced a major US wind farm offline for over four months caught the attention of the wind industry in March.
In just six months last year, three machines produced by the Danish turbine giant collapsed at the 400MW High Prairie wind farm in the US midwestern state of Missouri.The wind farm was commissioned in 2020 and Vestas said that as an “extraordinary precaution” the remaining turbines at the site had been paused while it conducted root cause analysis.
Coastal Massachusetts residents, already dealing with the ongoing aftereffects of the Vineyard Wind blade disaster, were thrilled to learn that asbestos had been found in wind turbine lift systems, which are like service elevators inside the tower. They're used to transport technicians and equipment to the top for maintenance. Sure seems like there's nothing but good stuff offshore, that residents still don't know the first thing about.
Everyone loves surprises, and the wind companies all sign good neighbor agreements, so it's okay.
Good morning to everyone in Massachusetts who knows there is nothing green about offshore wind.
— Chester Tam (@islantstudio) December 20, 2025
Now we’re learning that asbestos has been discovered in wind turbine lift systems, creating yet another setback for the offshore wind industry. This is not a minor issue. Asbestos is… pic.twitter.com/zfRZy07ESx
Voices are raised at long last in the bastions of Green.
Connecticut Republican State Senator Stephen Harding is on Newsmax spewing facts about the high cost of Offshore Wind energy.
— Kristi L. Talmadge (@KristiTalmadge) December 28, 2025
It's way more expensive per kWh than Nuclear and Gas and we get stuck paying for it!
Right on @SenHarding30 @CTSenateGOP! Who was the CT lady with you? pic.twitter.com/ANXSh0Y3Ct
Air and vessel safety, not to mention defense concerns about the turbines blocking radars aren't purely a Trumpian posturing for effect, either.
Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
The decision marks another example in Europe of national security factors seeping into political decisions that were deemed civilian in nature before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In this case, the issue is about two dueling interests: sustainable-energy independence and surveillance of the national airspace. That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
“The reaction time in the event of a missile attack could go from 2 minutes to 60 seconds with wind farms in the way,” Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson wrote in a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. They were accompanied by a schematic drawing of the wind farms casting a “shadow” behind them in which missiles and cruise missiles would stay undetected.
As I illustrated with a video I included in an earlier post, the evidence for wind turbine-induced radar interference is real.
And why would you need hundreds of square miles of whale and bird killing, possibly airplane and boat-hazardous turbines, when one lovely natural gas pipeline does the same thing for far less disruption and heartburn?
And for far less cost, both in money and environmental impact?
🚨 JUST IN: It's been revealed that the FIVE offshore windmill projects being terminated by President Trump and Sec. Doug Burgum could be replaced with *ONE* natural gas pipeline to produce the same amount of energy.
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 22, 2025
WIND ENERGY SUCKS! Trump is right!pic.twitter.com/g1YZ91Wrlb
Yeah. 2025 has been grim for wind.
And so much of it because the turbines no longer have government running cover for their naked worthlessness.
