President Donald Trump quickly issued an unexpectedly sweeping executive order that prevents federal government involvement in permitting of all offshore and onshore wind projects, including on private onshore land. It may even set the stage for halting projects that are under construction.

Some companies involved in wind are putting on a brave face, though uncertainty looms.

Trump’s memo specifically pauses new and renewed federal offshore wind leasing pending an environmental and economic review. The offshore pause will last until the executive order is “revoked”, said the White House.

"We're not going to do the wind thing. Big, ugly windmills. They ruin your neighbourhood," said the 47^th president, who was inaugurated on 20 January. He had previously promised to halt offshore wind on “day one”.

“If you have a house that's near a windmill, guess what? Your house is worth less than half... And they're the most expensive form of energy that you can have, by far. And they're all made in China, by the way, practically all of them. And they kill your birds, and they ruin your beautiful landscapes," he said.

BloombergNEF notes that the permitted US offshore wind project pipeline is 18 GW, including nearly 5 GW of projects under construction. Iberdrola’s US subsidiary Avangrid, Ørsted and Equinor hold the most permitted offshore wind projects, it said.

The executive order has rattled the global wind industry. There had been rumours that only offshore wind leasing off the East Coast would be temporarily halted for six months.

The US is the world’s second largest modern wind power market after China, and the oldest.

Trump issued pro-oil and gas measures among the 200 or so executive orders that were released within hours of being sworn in.

The American Clean Power Association (ACP)’s CEO Jason Grumet slammed the anti-wind order.

“ACP strongly opposes blanket measures to halt or impede development of domestic wind energy on federal lands and waters. The contradiction between the energy-focused executive orders is stark: while on one hand the administration seeks to reduce bureaucracy and unleash energy production, on the other it increases bureaucratic barriers, undermining domestic energy development and harming American businesses and workers.

“The possibility that the federal government could seek to actively oppose energy production by American companies on private land is at odds with our nation’s character as well as our national interests,” continued Grumet.

There are bound to be legal challenges to parts of the order, though it is not yet clear on what grounds.

Senior executives of major companies involved in renewables are in public dismissing the significance of Trump’s action, saying that their market will grow because electrification is unstoppable.

According to CNBC, Joe Kaeser, chairman of the supervisory board of Europe-oriented Siemens Energy, said he saw Trump’s anti-wind move as a “slight plus” for the German company. The company’s shares indeed rose slightly after Trump was sworn in.

“We need to see what’s behind all the executive orders and the policies. So far, I believe there are many areas where actually Siemens Energy benefits a lot,” he told CNBC at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meet in Davos. Siemens Energy is involved in gas turbines and other hydrocarbon equipment.

For his part Ignacio Galán, executive chairman of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, which owns Avangrid, told CNBC that electrification will go ahead anyway. He noted increased global demand for data centres especially because of AI.

In contract, the offshore wind developer Orsted saw its shares dipping 4.4% first thing on January 22. It had announced the same day as Trump’s executive order an $1.7 billion impairment charge on US projects. Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas’ stock fell about 7% on that day.

But according to the headline of a note from BloombergNEF, the strategic research group, US offshore wind is “down but not out”.

This is presumably because the energy source is the cheapest according to financial group Lazard, and is expected to continue to grow, albeit slowly in the US at least during the next four years when Trump is in office.

Trump has famously taken a particular dislike to wind power. His public comments against wind have coincided with his unsuccessful opposition to an offshore wind being built near his private coastal golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Other weapons in the pro-oil president’s arsenal could include trimming budgets at the US Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees energy development in federal waters, Shashi Barla, global wind analyst, had told NewsBase just before the inauguration.

Trump could also appoint supporters to head government divisions that oversee and regulate wind power, impose heavy taxes on wind projects that are currently under execution to render them economically unviable, prompting other developers to hold back their plans, and just generally incentivise the oil and gas sector to make offshore wind unattractive for investors.

As Trump’s inauguration loomed, Barla noted that wind stocks had plummeted on both sides of the Atlantic the day after Trump was elected on November 5.