05/31/2026
Rhode Island Keeps Chasing Offshore Wind While The Warning Signs Keep Getting Louder
PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island officials keep looking for another way to push offshore wind forward, but the record is becoming harder to ignore. The state has already tried, failed, scaled down, walked away, and watched even existing projects get caught in federal uncertainty. Now, despite all of that, lawmakers are still entertaining plans to study another 1,200 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030. At some point, repeated failure stops looking like bad luck. It starts looking like the market, the public, and the energy system all sending the same warning.
Rhode Island’s offshore wind expansion beyond Revolution Wind has already stumbled more than once. In 2022, state leaders required Rhode Island Energy to seek between 600 and 1,000 megawatts of new offshore wind. The only bid was Revolution Wind 2, an 884 megawatt proposal from Ørsted and Eversource. Rhode Island Energy rejected it in 2023, citing costs that were too high for electric customers.
Then the state tried again. Rhode Island Energy issued a new request for up to 1,200 megawatts of offshore wind. After all the talk of a major new procurement, Rhode Island selected only 200 megawatts from SouthCoast Wind in 2024. Even that smaller deal did not survive. In November 2025, Rhode Island Energy ended negotiations with SouthCoast Wind, citing delays and federal uncertainty.
That makes the pattern clear. Rhode Island sought hundreds of megawatts more offshore wind and got nothing. It sought 1,200 megawatts and got a tentative 200 megawatts. Then it walked away from the 200 megawatts too.
Even Revolution Wind itself, the project state leaders continue to celebrate, has not escaped the national turbulence surrounding offshore wind. Federal officials ordered the project to halt ongoing activities in August 2025, then issued another order in December 2025 suspending ongoing activity for 90 days on national security grounds. The project has since begun delivering power, but the stop orders showed that even nearly completed offshore wind projects are not immune from serious federal concerns.
Despite all of this, Rhode Island lawmakers introduced legislation this year to create an offshore wind study commission with a goal of examining how the state could procure 1,200 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030. Supporters may call that planning. Ratepayers should see something else: an effort to keep reviving a policy goal that has repeatedly failed to produce a responsible deal.
The warning signs are not limited to Rhode Island. Across the country, offshore wind is losing the easy public support it once enjoyed. National polling from AP NORC found fewer Americans support expanding offshore wind than did a few years ago. Support dropped from 59 percent in 2022 to 44 percent in 2025.
The decline is even sharper in places where residents actually have to live with these projects. In New Jersey, Monmouth University found support for offshore wind off the state’s coast fell from 76 percent in 2019 to 54 percent in 2023. Opposition rose from 15 percent to 40 percent. Among coastal county residents, support collapsed from 75 percent to 43 percent. Stockton University found a similar drop, with statewide support falling from 80 percent in 2019 to 50 percent in 2023, and support in coastal communities falling to just 33 percent.
The revealing trend is what happens when the projects become real. When turbines move from climate slogans to visible construction, ocean impacts, transmission fights, cost concerns, and ratepayer exposure, the public mood changes.
The industry itself is sending the same message. EEW American Offshore Structures, the New Jersey company tied to the first major U.S. monopile manufacturing facility for offshore wind, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April. The company was supposed to represent the domestic offshore wind supply chain that officials have spent years promising would bring stable jobs and industrial growth. Instead, it became another warning sign that the industry’s business assumptions are not as solid as advertised.
In Massachusetts, GE Vernova tried to back away from its Vineyard Wind obligations, prompting Vineyard Wind to sue to stop the company from exiting. A court temporarily blocked GE from leaving, but the dispute itself exposed the fragility behind one of the nation’s most high profile offshore wind projects. When a major turbine supplier is fighting to get out of a major project, the public should not be told that offshore wind is a stable, obvious bargain.
Rhode Island should take the hint. Offshore wind is not the clean, easy, affordable promise it was sold as. It is an increasingly contested industry facing higher costs, weaker public confidence, federal resistance, corporate disputes, supply chain failures, and repeated procurement breakdowns.
The state’s leaders have already shown, through their own failed efforts, that they cannot find a responsible way to expand offshore wind beyond the commitments already made. They rejected one plan, walked away from another, watched an active project get put on hold, and are now trying to study the same 1,200 megawatt goal that already failed to materialize. This is not leadership. It is reckless persistence.
Rhode Island should not keep pushing ratepayers deeper into an energy gamble that is becoming less affordable, less secure, and less welcomed the closer it gets to shore. The more offshore wind becomes real, the more people are rejecting the next round of promises. The state should stop pretending the warning signs are temporary setbacks and recognize them for what they are.
This is a bad idea, and Rhode Island should stop chasing it.
