Donald Trump’s war against the offshore wind industry doesn’t even get a break during the holidays.

On Monday, the Trump administration abruptly halted construction and lease activity for five major offshore wind projects along the East Coast, delivering one of the most severe blows yet to the U.S. wind sector. The biggest casualty was the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project… the largest offshore wind development ever attempted in the United States.

The market reaction was swift. Shares of Dominion Energy, which is developing the Virginia project, dropped more than 4% following the announcement. Overseas, the damage was even sharper. Denmark’s Orsted saw its stock tumble more than 11%, while Norway’s Equinor barely went red.

Officially, the pause comes down to national security. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the leases were suspended after concerns raised by the Pentagon. According to the Interior Department, the massive turbine blades and highly reflective towers can interfere with military radar systems, creating false signals and obscuring real targets near sensitive coastal installations.

Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind sits squarely in that debate. The $10.9 billion project includes 176 turbines and is designed to generate 2.6 gigawatts of electricity… enough to power more than 600,000 homes. Construction was already underway, with Dominion previously targeting completion as soon as next year. The utility has repeatedly argued the project is critical to meeting Virginia’s surging electricity demand, particularly in Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers on the planet.

That demand isn’t a made up number. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and government infrastructure are driving rapid load growth, and Dominion has warned that delaying the project threatens grid reliability for military, AI, and civilian systems. The company also warned of higher energy prices and job losses if the pause drags on.

The Virginia project wasn’t alone. The administration also paused Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Revolution Wind near Rhode Island and Connecticut, Sunrise Wind off Long Island, and Empire Wind 1 south of New York. Together, the projects represent tens of billions of dollars in capital investment and more than a decade of permitting and planning.

Federal officials say the suspension will last 90 days while agencies work with developers and state partners to assess whether the security risks can be mitigated. But for an industry already dealing with cost overruns, legal challenges, and political whiplash, that reassurance only goes so far.

Trump has targeted offshore wind since his first day back in office, calling it expensive, inefficient, and harmful to wildlife. Courts have already pushed back on parts of that agenda, but the uncertainty alone has been enough to rattle investors.

That tension now sits at the center of U.S. energy policy. Offshore wind was once framed as a long-term decarbonization effort. The AI boom has pulled the timeline forward… and data centers care far more about uptime than ideology. Politics, however, continues to complicate the math.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.