Aerial view of Minco’s wind turbines
Oklahoma is currently caught between a long-established fossil fuel industry and the growing potential of wind and solar power.
President Donald Trump bragged about his opposition to wind turbines during a meeting with oil executives at the White House on Friday, January 9, reaffirming his long-held aversion to wind turbines.
“In case you don’t know, I’m not really interested in windmills,” the president told oil company executives. “Not a single wind turbine has been approved since I took office, and I intend to continue to do so.”
“My goal is to never build any windmills. They’re losers,” Trump said. He slammed wind farms in Europe and Palm Springs, California, citing inaccurate statistics about the number of wind turbines in China.
Europe is “losing a huge amount of wealth by putting up windmills all over the place,” the president said. “They’re destroying their country. They’re destroying beautiful landscapes. They’re destroying everything that’s beautiful.”
“Go to Palm Springs, California, and see what it’s like,” said President Trump, who has been erecting fences around wind turbines for at least 13 years. “It’s like a junkyard, a steel junkyard.”
President Trump said, “Almost all of our windmills are made in China.” “They make them and used to sell them to underdogs like Europe and underdogs like the United States.”
“All you have to do is say to China: ‘How many windmill fields does China have?’ So far we haven’t found anything,” he said. “They use coal, they use oil and gas, a little bit of nuclear power, but not a lot, but they don’t have windmills.”
According to the federal government’s Department of Energy, China is actually a world leader in the use of wind turbines for energy production.
How much wind energy is China installing?
In 2025, the Department of Energy reported that China will add 79 gigawatts of wind power capacity in 2024, increasing capacity by 18%. Total wind power capacity reached 521 gigawatts.
According to Statista, there are 138 offshore wind farms in operation in China as of April 2025. The company led the world in new offshore wind installations in 2024 for the seventh year in a row, according to the Global Wind Energy Council’s Global Offshore Wind Report, an international trade association.
According to the World Wind Energy Association, this market has the highest growth rate of any major market and is expected to install more than 87 gigawatts of wind power by 2025.
Wind and solar power are two of the fastest growing energy sectors in the United States, producing 17% of the nation’s electricity in 2024, according to the Department of Energy. Land-based wind turbines produce 10% of the nation’s electricity, most of it on private land, the industry group American Clean Power reported.
Jesse Lee, a senior adviser at Climate Power, an advocacy group focused on climate change and clean energy, said nearly 95% of new energy generation capacity in the United States comes from wind, solar and batteries. Since taking office a year ago, the president has “successfully promoted new wind and solar power” in a variety of ways, Lee said.
Clean Power criticizes President Trump’s meeting with the oil industry, which the advocacy group claims has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to influence Trump and other Republican campaigns, “destroying the nation’s clean energy industry and actually lowering energy costs for Americans.”
President Trump announced earlier this week that the United States would withdraw from 66 treaties, treaties and organizations, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, angering climate change and environmental advocacy groups.
What is the Trump administration’s stance on wind energy?
In the first year of his second administration, President Trump declared a national energy emergency, but also issued a flurry of executive orders and directives restricting new wind and solar projects and taking aim at subsidies and incentives for renewable energy. An executive order temporarily halts lease sales of offshore wind energy in federal waters and suspends approvals, permits and financing for both offshore and onshore wind power, USA TODAY previously reported.
The administration has canceled five projects underway off the coast of New England and is facing lawsuits from companies that had already invested heavily in new wind energy before the projects were canceled, according to reports in the Providence Journal and other news outlets on the USA TODAY Network in the region.
Federal officials were also directed to consider the environmental impacts of wind energy projects on wildlife and to consider the “economic costs associated with intermittent generation” and the impact of subsidies on the viability of the wind energy industry.
Mr. Lee said President Trump “did his best to ban wind and solar while data centers and AI are causing electricity demand to go through the roof.”
According to the Department of Energy, peak electricity demand in the United States hit a record high twice in July 2025.
In a meeting with executives on January 9, President Trump vowed to continue his work on wind energy, calling turbines the “worst form of energy.”
“That’s why we don’t approve, and we told the people we don’t approve windmills,” he said. “We may have to do something because some idiot in the Biden administration agreed to do something years ago.”
Dinah Boyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, covers climate change, wildlife and the environment. Contact dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or dinahvp.77 on X or Signal.
