Donald J. Quixote’s been tilting at windmills for months.
Yesterday I dropped a “coincidence theory” linking his obsession with Greenland to his particular obsession with tilting at offshore windmills.
The long-story-short of it is … Denmark’s refusal to hand Trump the keys to Greenland may be linked to the punishment he just inflicted on Ørsted, a windpower company that just-so-happens to be majority-owned by the State of Denmark.
Ørsted just tilted back.
According to Barron’s, the lawsuit they filed today is the first “direct” response to Trump’s widening war “against the wind industry.” The Danish energy company is asking the court to overturn the recently-issued stop-work order that halted Revolution Wind, a nearly-completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.
Up to now, the clean energy industry has mostly kept a low profile and hoped for the best. It’s not like anyone in the media or Congress has stepped-up to counter Trump’s increasingly outlandish claims about solar and, in particular, about wind. So, embattled and alone, they hunkered down in a PR foxhole as he shot-off his mouth, perhaps in the hopes he’d eventually run out of ammo. But, as Latitude Media noted today, when it came time for Congress to grind the sausage that’d become Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)…
….most individual clean energy developers appeared unwilling to make a public case for the tax credits that have been so important to the industry’s growth. Instead, they relied on trade organizations and quiet, behind-the-scenes advocacy from large corporate energy buyers to make their case to lawmakers.
And how did that work out?
The strategy proved largely ineffective. The legislation’s final cuts to critical tax investments were only slightly less harsh than the initial draft that caused the clean energy industry’s “holy shit moment” back in May. Key tax credits for solar, wind and other clean technologies are being phased out over the next year.
That “holy shit moment” refers to a Ways and Means Committee draft that “proposed eliminating or curtailing most of the tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.” The final version also killed tax credits for most new clean power projects and it required all tax-eligible projects to “start construction within 60 days of the bill’s final passage.”
It finally passed and Trump signed it on July 4th. Without missing a beat, he then widened his war on clean energy. Here’s more from Latitude Media:
[T]he administration’s approach to block clean energy has been multi-pronged, and extended beyond reconciliation: executive orders to halt new offshore wind leases, new layers of approvals for solar developments, and stop-work orders on already-approved projects. By many accounts that approach is working: Even before the passage of the OBBB, research showed that more clean energy projects were closed, cancelled, or downsized in the first half of 2025 than in the prior two years combined, totaling around $22 billion in lost investment.
“Lost investment” likely motivated Ørsted’s decision to engage in windpower’s first head-on legal battle with Donnie Quixoite. They’ve got a cool $5 billion already sunk unto Revolution Wind and a stock that’s been battered by Trump’s assault. Ørsted needs to raise $9 billion to “prop up its finances,” and it is getting an infusion from the Norwegian-owned oil multinational Equinor.
Equinor has some experience with Trump’s war on wind. Although primarily a petroleum company, it had a windpower project in New York that Trump shut down in April. They avoided a direct confrontation when Governor Kathy Hochul stepped-in to negotiate a costly settlement. The order was lifted, but it cost Equinor an additional $955 million to restart it.
The difference now is the regime’s use of “national security” as a pretext. Barron’s noted that “the Department of the Interior said the wind farm raised national security issues, without giving additional details.”
In today’s filing, Ørsted responded by pointing out that “the Department of Defense, along with about a dozen other state and local agencies, already signed off on the project after years of reviews.” They allege that the “order was based largely on Trump’s longstanding personal antipathy for wind power.”
As I noted yesterday, that’s a plausible argument. Look no further than Trump’s Turnberry golf resort for evidence of his maniacal antipathy. But it sure is a timely coincidence that this all comes as Trump is ratcheting-up the pressure on Greenland. Last week we learned about a Trump-linked covert influence campaign to foment revolution in the semi-autonomous territory. The relationship between Washington and Copenhagen is kinda turning into a medium-grade diplomatic crisis. When Ørsted got hit by the stop-work order, it hurt the State of Denmark. Norway is helping out and the lawsuit sparked a 4% rise in its stock, but every day Revolution Wind isn’t online is a bad day for the bottom line.