Texas state officials have led a successful and concerted effort to prevent offshore wind developments in the Gulf. Over the last few years, key leaders whose signatures and support are required to permit energy developments off the coast signaled to investors that such approvals would be unlikely.

So even as five offshore wind projects resume construction this month after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s stop-work order for the developments, Texas has none in the mix. The U.S. has a small number of projects operating off the East Coast, totalling some 40 gigawatts.

Texas leads the nation in wind energy, producing more than a fifth of the country’s wind-sourced electricity. Studies show the region could have similar success offshore, especially given the state’s experience building oil and gas rigs in the Gulf. Yet an auction of federal seabed leases nearly three years ago saw no bids.

While there are a myriad of reasons no offshore wind projects are operational or underway off the coast of Texas, experts say chief among them is the political hostility from state leaders, and, more recently, the federal government, toward this type of renewable energy.

In August 2023, three federal leases were put up for bid for the first time in the Gulf of Mexico by the Biden administration to build wind farms.

President Joe Biden had set a goal to produce 30 gigawatts, which the administration said could power 10 million homes and avoid 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. One of the federal land sites was off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The other two were off the Texas coast, some 30 nautical miles from Galveston.

Both renewable energy developers and oil and gas companies, like Shell and TotalEnergies, qualified as bidders for the Texas sites.

The lease holder would have been eligible to generate power to sell to Texas’ electric grid or to produce hydrogen power. The Louisiana lease sold for $5.6 million, but no company bid on either of the Texas spots.

Despite the mature workforce with the know-how to build offshore facilities in the Gulf, Colin Leyden, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas director, said there weren’t high expectations that the Texas leases would be the first to go. It was clear that offshore wind had a few high-profile antagonists, he said.

Any offshore substations or cable landing facilities onshore from sea wind developments would need approval from the state’s coastal lands and seabeds regulator, General Land Office Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. Ahead of the lease sale, Buckingham said her office wouldn’t grant the necessary approvals for an offshore wind farm to commence construction.

The General Land Office did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.

It signaled to investors that Texas was a risky place to invest, said Stacy Ortego, the Gulf of Mexico offshore wind energy campaign manager for the National Wildlife Federation.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, state leadership welcomed the investment. Louisiana’s previous governor, John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, put together a climate initiative task force that recommended 5 gigawatts of offshore wind power generation by 2035.

“That was a strong indicator that Louisiana was open for business for offshore wind,” Ortego said. “Whereas Texas was sending the opposite message.”

The 2023 auction also came shortly after a legislative session in which nearly a dozen bills sought to curb the expansion of renewable energy across the state, including one that proposed a new process that would make it extremely difficult to build offshore wind farms on the Texas side of the Gulf of Mexico.

When the two leases received no bids, Sen. Mayes Middleton, a Republican from Galveston who sponsored the bill aiming to ban offshore wind, posted that he would refile bills in the following session to ensure that there would never be offshore wind in Texas. Many of those same bills were reintroduced in the 2025 Legislature and were unsuccessful.

Middleton, who heads an oil company, did not respond to an interview request.

Wayne Christian, a leader of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, wrote in 2023 to Gov. Greg Abbott and Buckingham to express his concern that while the wind farms would be in federal waters, they would have consequences across Texas lands. He said he was especially worried about coastal communities relying on the Gulf for commercial fishing, tourism and industrial or transportation jobs, Christian wrote.

The oil and gas regulator also wrote in defense of the state’s fossil fuel industry, a common sight offshore in the Gulf. Christian said he feared that the Biden administration would not rest until it ended Texas oil and gas. “Something must be done to stop President Biden from implementing these wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico,” Christian said.

Anna Weiss, director of green initiatives at Vision Galveston, a community nonprofit, has heard the concern that offshore wind would obstruct views and harm tourism. But the turbines would be far offshore, she noted. And Galveston’s shoreline has many industrial applications already.

“Offshore wind would really transform the Texas energy grid,” Weiss said. “We need to balance these concerns and try to understand what it is going to take to move forward together.”

Nearly three years after Christian’s comments opposing offshore wind, he remains firm in his opinion that it cannot make the same promises of reliability and economic growth as Texas’ methane can. Offshore wind requires massive subsidies and backup generation to account for the vagaries of weather, Christian said in a statement.

“At the end of the day, Texans deserve energy that is dependable, affordable, and grounded in reality—not policies driven by ideology,” he said in his statement. “That’s why I’ll continue to stand up for the resources that have made Texas the energy capital of the world.”

The same year the state’s oil and gas regulators lobbied against federal lease sales for offshore wind and the federal government offered clean energy tax credits, state legislators floated the idea of a natural gas subsidy program. In 2025 they approved a $7.2 billion fund of low-interest loans and bonus grants incentivizing new gas-fueled power plants.

The federal government initially estimated that the two Gulf sites, plus the Lake Charles lease, would generate some 3.7 gigawatts of power, depending on which models of turbines were ultimately selected, enough for almost 1.3 million homes. The coastal turbines with rotor blades reaching nearly 900 feet tall generate three times the power of a land turbine.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management identified that nearly a third of the shallow-water offshore wind potential in the U.S. lies beyond the Texas and Louisiana shores in the Gulf. High wind speeds and proximity to coastal energy users make the area well-suited for such projects, the agency noted.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory said after the lackluster auction that while it’s unlikely offshore wind will develop in the Gulf before 2030, there remains significant optimism that it can be deployed as the global industry matures and costs come down. The area’s oil and gas infrastructure and skilled labor give it a head start, a 2023 report from the lab stated.

Part of why the Texas area leases didn’t get any bids was bad timing, said Ortego. Supply chain bottlenecks, rising material costs and higher interest rates contributed to the disinterest, too. But the main reason the leases went unsold, Ortego figures, is political pushback from state leadership.

If Americans later elect a president friendlier to offshore wind, Ortego said, momentum in Texas could pick up. “There’s a lot of opportunities in the Gulf—we have a very robust offshore energy development industry that’s really poised to take advantage of offshore wind opportunities.”

Challenges to Texas’ Potential

Beyond opposition from state officials, there are other barriers in Texas to an offshore wind energy industry taking off in the Gulf.

One is that offshore wind farms in Texas are more challenging to develop than in other states because of the way the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ electric market works, Leyden said. The competitive energy market makes it difficult for new energy types to join the mix.

New entrants with high price tags do not benefit from, in the case of Louisiana, for example, an integrated utility potentially wrapping all the costs of new infrastructure into the ratepayer base, Leyden said. It’s true for nuclear or hydrogen too, he said, or any resource type that has a premium on the front end.

“That’s certainly one reason why there hasn’t been as much excitement around development,” Leyden said.

This lack of enthusiasm is notable because solar, batteries and onshore wind are the cheapest resources available to build in ERCOT, Leyden said. Texas continues to increasingly power the state’s electricity demands with renewables. On Feb. 28, for example, 83 percent of the morning demand was met by solar and wind. Throughout the whole day, renewables provided nearly 70 percent of the state’s power.

Given how productive offshore wind could be in the Gulf, existing large generators probably feel more threatened by it than by other renewables, Leyden said. “It’s hard to know how much that plays into it as well,” Leyden said.

Developers also must consider hurricanes in the Gulf. A National Renewable Energy Laboratory report suggested using stronger “typhoon class” wind turbines.

Meanwhile, the attempts by Trump’s second administration to shutter nearly completed offshore wind facilities sends a message to the capital markets that these projects are risky to put money into right now, Leyden said.

“Don’t discount what the federal administration has done with existing offshore wind projects as having a chilling effect,” Leyden said.

Last week, the administration disclosed that it had agreed to pay TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas major, nearly $1 billion to stop its plans for building wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina in exchange for the company investing the funds in new oil and gas projects in the United States.

What About Wildlife?

The Southern Shrimp Alliance, which represents the shrimping industry across eight states, worried about the impact of offshore wind construction and operation in the Gulf when auction plans geared up. Alliance spokesperson Deborah Long said the trade association persuaded the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to eliminate problematic locations.

“Of the 13 areas BOEM initially identified as suitable for wind energy development in the Gulf—areas that could have catastrophically disrupted access to traditional shrimping grounds—only a single, carefully selected area was ultimately leased,” Long said.

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Shrimpers weren’t only concerned about shrimp. If development harmed sensitive species, like endangered sea turtles and red snappers, the alliance worried its members would be on the hook to pay regulatory fines or see the fishery temporarily closed.

The wildlife impacts can be overcome, the National Wildlife Federation’s Ortego said. Responsible offshore wind developments reduce noise during site surveying by lowering vessel speeds in areas frequented by endangered species and plan construction schedules in tandem with species’ migration calendars, she said.

The biggest threat to wildlife is not transitioning to cleaner energy, Ortego added. “The effects of climate change far outweigh any potential impacts of offshore wind or other renewable development,” she said.

The National Audubon Society, a conservancy group for birds, says in a 2025 report that “developing offshore wind energy is a solvable problem for birds, while unchecked climate change is not.” Two thirds of North American bird species are set to face extinction unless climate change is addressed, the group warned.

To avoid bird collisions and impacts, the Audubon Society recommends siting prospective Gulf wind farms in the middle continental shelf, further offshore.

Official Opposition, Public Support

After the failed 2023 auction, the Biden administration considered another sale of federal leases for offshore wind. In a letter filed to BOEM in September 2024, Buckingham, the Texas General Land Office commissioner, reminded the agency that access to underwater land for transmission lines required an easement she could approve or deny.

The land office, she wrote, might very well condition approval on a heightened bond and financial assurance measure beyond what BOEM would require.

A few months earlier, she told the agency she was “uniquely qualified to shed light on the folly of the Biden administration’s … continued efforts to force-feed the American people failed ‘green’ policies.”

“I am charged with determining whether the granting of an easement is in the best interest of the state. I can assure you that when weighing the interests, I will do so objectively and without being influenced by ‘green’ policy goals,” Buckingham wrote.

That and other opposition against offshore wind comes as the state anticipates up to 5 million more residents by 2036 and a growing queue of large energy users seeking to connect to the state’s grid. A 2025 poll by Texas A&M University at Galveston found that 71 percent of Texans support wind development off the state’s coast.

One of the study authors, Elizabeth Nyman, an associate professor of maritime studies, said the state has about half the Gulf’s technical capacity for offshore wind thanks to its long shoreline—enough to meet more than 160 percent of the state’s 2025 energy needs.

Of the 600 Texas residents polled, more than three-quarters ranked both on and offshore wind in the top five energy sources they’d like the state to incentivize.