Voters are choosing new governors Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey, states where ambitious plans for offshore wind projects run against the Trump administration’s political and legal war on renewable energy projects.

Days before, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate potential health and safety hazards from offshore wind turbines, a new front in the Trump administration’s offensive to squelch wind power development.

The administration and its executive departments like HHS have effectively derailed many of the wind industry’s earlier project approvals granted under the Biden administration. But some ongoing construction projects survive, notably Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project (CVOW), as power demands and costs escalate in the Mid-Atlantic states. Kennedy’s new review could revisit longstanding health and safety claims by offshore wind opponents, including electromagnetic effects of turbine array cables and transmission lines.

In the Virginia governor’s race, polls showed Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger may likely win against Republican Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Earle-Sears. Outgoing Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been a strong supporter of CVOW.

But offshore wind advocates still worry the Virginia project could come under renewed attack from the Trump administration.

A decade ago commercial fishermen foresaw that U.S. planning for offshore wind could disrupt marine life and traditional fishing grounds, and the industry fought hard against the Biden administration’s push to approve construction and operations plans. The reversal of fortunes under Trump has wind project opponents still pressing to bury any chances of future revival.

“When you put a windmill up, the cod disappear, the groundfish disappear,” Kennedy told radio station WABC New York Oct. 30. “The fishermen are going out of business.”

The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health will lead the inquiry, Bloomberg reported Oct. 28. NIOSH was among contributors to a September 2025 report on the Energy Transition for the U.S. Commercial Fishing Industry: Technical and Operational Advisory, along with the Coast Guard, Alaska Marine Safety Education Association (AMSEA), Washington Maritime Blue, and the American Bureau of Shipping.

“I think that’s the real key here,” said Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for Seafreeze Ltd., Point Judith, R.I. European fishermen working around wind turbine arrays in the North Sea have been endangered when gear snags around the installations, Lapp told Fox Business News Oct. 30.

In the U.S., a 2022 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine cautioned that mariners’ onboard radar systems “are not presently optimized to operate in a wind turbine generator environment.”

”Mariners can adapt to operating radars around wind turbines, especially with the latest radar equipment and appropriate training, the 2022 National Academies report said. But adjusting to the image clutter and scatter from turbines will obfuscate their view of smaller vessels amid the turbine fields – a critical problem for search and rescue operations, the report says.

Since then, wind turbine projects continue to actually jeopardize the occupational safety of fishermen,” said Lapp.

The latest September advisory discussed how turbine arrays “present external risks to commercial fishing vessels and crews” including “changes to fishing areas, longer transit times that contribute to fatigue, increased vessel traffic, and a heightened risk of collisions, allisions, and groundings.”

Inflation, escalating costs and supply chain problems pummeled the fledging U.S. offshore wind industry, triggering the sudden cancellation of Ørsted’s Ocean Wind project off New Jersey two years ago.

Those economic challenges and the arrival of a second Trump administration continued the cascade, but five previously permitted offshore wind projects survive so far.

 Off southern New England, Ørsted’sRevolution Wind project won a temporary reprieve in federal court when a judge reversed the Trump administration’s order to stop construction that was already 80 percent complete.

Equinor’s Empire Wind 814 MW project underway off New York Harbor was a first target in mid-April of those stop-work orders. But Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reversed course a month later, reportedly bargaining with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration to allow Empire Wind to progress in exchange for the state dropping opposition to a new Northeast natural gas pipeline.

In Virginia, bipartisan political support for Dominion Energy’s Coast Virginia Offshore Wind array has allowed construction to proceed on the planned 176-turbine array without major interference, aside from lingering legal challenges from conservative activist groups.

Yet when political opportunities present, administration officials continue their rhetorical carpet-bombing. At an Oct. 21 panel discussion hosted by the American Petroleum Institute, Burgum insisted “intermittent, highly expensive wind is bad for everybody.” 

At local and state levels, offshore wind opposition groups and renewable energy advocates are keeping the pressure up, hoping to somehow skew public opinion in their favor for the longer term.

The New Jersey governor’s race, to be decided Tuesday by voters between Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli, has been cast by partisans as a final decision whether to permanently abandon the state’s longtime efforts to develop wind energy.

Sherrill, who has called offshore wind a next frontier for the state, is a lightning rod for anti-wind activist groups, who battled outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s renewable energy plans for years.

Those ambitions began to collapse on Halloween 2023 when Ørsted abruptly cancelled its Ocean Wind 1 project. While both candidates to replace Murphy as governor promise emergency action to reduced consumers’ electric bills, Ciattarelli advocates a return to advancing nuclear and other legacy power sources.