Maryland leaders have long pictured fields of wind turbines along the horizon off the Eastern Shore, distant pinwheels sending a limitless supply of clean power to homes across the region.

But the state’s fledgling industry may face its doomsday in President Donald Trump, who has a longtime grudge against turbines.

Maryland officials aim to develop 8.5 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2031, vastly more capacity than exists in the United States today. Executives with the state’s leading offshore developer, US Wind, have predicted that an industry boom could turn the Port of Baltimore into the Silicon Valley of offshore wind.

Yet more than a decade after Maryland passed its first law aimed at luring wind farms, no turbines stud the ocean.

This summer, the president began an all-out assault on the offshore wind industry, and experts say the damage could last long after he’s left office.

“There is no sugarcoating it. This administration wants to kill offshore wind now and forever,” said Timothy Fox, managing director of the consultancy ClearView Energy Partners.

Since issuing a first-day order to halt new permits, Trump’s administration has taken steps to throttle government financing and roll back approvals for offshore wind. It ordered work to stop last month on a nearly complete wind farm off Rhode Island, stranding its construction crew at sea.

Then on Friday, the administration asked a federal judge in Maryland to revoke the permit for Baltimore-based US Wind’s contested wind farm off Maryland’s coast.

That project could one day produce over two gigawatts of clean power, but it’s mired in skirmishes with Ocean City and other jurisdictions, which sued the U.S. Department of the Interior last fall over the wind farm’s location 10 miles offshore.

The US Wind venture is the lone federally permitted wind farm off Maryland’s coast and the state’s only hope of bringing turbines online anytime soon.

In a statement, US Wind maintained that it plans to push ahead. Despite the administration’s efforts, the company’s federal permits remain “fully in force,” said Nancy Sopko, the firm’s vice president of external affairs.

“We are confident that a court will uphold their validity and will prevent any adverse action against them,” she said.

Still, Fox, the offshore wind analyst, described the political barriers mounting against US Wind as substantial and “perhaps insurmountable.”

Not only is US Wind battling for its federal permit in court, but Trump’s domestic policy bill passed earlier this year ends lucrative Biden-era tax credits for offshore wind developments that go into service after 2027 or begin construction by next July.

These tax credits are consequential, Fox said, accounting for as much as half of construction costs in certain cases.

In her statement, Sopko said US Wind prepared for many potential scenarios and “nothing in recent federal legislation impacts our ability to build the project.”

If US Wind doesn’t survive Trump’s onslaught, though, it would set back Maryland’s offshore wind industry by years.

The company first leased waters for its wind farm more than a decade ago and only received its federal construction permit in the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s term.

Meanwhile, a once-promising venture in nearby waters, by the Danish developer Ørsted, has been paused since late 2023, though the company retains its lease. A third company, Equinor, paid $75 million last year to lease 100,000 acres off the Delaware-Maryland coast but has released little information since on its plans.

Trump’s White House also directed agencies across the administration to draft plans to hamstring the nascent American industry.

Late last month, the Department of Transportation canceled $679 million in grants for “doomed” offshore wind manufacturing projects at ports across the country. That included $47 million for a steel manufacturing plant US Wind is building in Sparrows Point.

Sopko said US Wind will press forward with the Sparrows Point plant despite the axed funding, noting that the facility also could serve the energy and shipbuilding industries.

In court, US Wind accused the Trump administration of arbitrarily exerting “political pressure” to end American offshore wind investments.

The Trump administration’s steps to pull permits are “inextricably tied to a wider plan to hinder or kill outright offshore wind projects (and renewable energy projects more generally) for political purposes,” company attorneys said in a filing this month.

Whether these tactics hold up in court remains to be seen.

“The legal bases they have announced so far are remarkably flimsy,” said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, of the Trump administration’s arguments.

Some actions, like stopping the nearly finished Rhode Island project, are “extraordinarily rare,” Gerrard said. Justifying that decision on CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum argued that offshore turbines could leave the power grid susceptible to undersea drone attacks, a rationale that Gerrard said “barely meets the red-face test.”

While Maryland’s Democratic leaders broadly support wind, Republicans have long argued against courting the industry. Maryland law guarantees a ratepayer subsidy for power generated by offshore turbines.

State Sen. Justin Ready, a Carroll County Republican, said Maryland leaders have wasted time trying to attract the wind industry when they could have focused on energy sources like natural gas or nuclear power.

Efforts to develop the waters off the Eastern Shore with wind farms date back to former Gov. Martin O’Malley, who signed the state’s first bill to establish a ratepayer subsidy for offshore wind in 2013. Ready has argued that underwriting the industry on the backs of Maryland customers isn’t worth it.

“It was pie in the sky then, and it really hasn’t gotten any better,” he said.

Others argue the mid-Atlantic industry will outlast the Trump storm.

As stress on the electricity grid grows, so will market pressure for clean, affordable power, and few energy sources can provide these things on the scale of offshore wind farms, said Stephanie Francoeur with Oceantic Network, a Baltimore-based group advocating for offshore wind.

But the growing partisan divide over offshore wind doesn’t bode well for its future in the U.S., Fox said. The analyst said future developers may be wary of green-lighting spending without confidence they can complete a project within the four-year term of a favorable president.

If Trump succeeds in sinking Maryland’s offshore wind industry, the local cost could be substantial.

Without it, Maryland leaders could watch billions of dollars in offshore development and manufacturing capacity evaporate. They would say goodbye to dreams of an offshore wind manufacturing hub in Baltimore. And plans to decarbonize the state’s power grid — necessary for erasing Maryland’s contributions to climate change — may be nigh impossible without offshore turbines.

Even so, experts said there still may be a pathway for US Wind under Trump — if Maryland and Gov. Wes Moore are willing to pay a price.

After the Trump administration iced the Empire Wind farm off the coast of Long Island, the developer lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to delayed construction and threatened to walk away from its project.

The administration clashed with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul before reversing its stance.

Trump officials claimed they only allowed Empire Wind to go forward after the Democrat pledged to clear a path for natural gas pipelines in her state.

Hochul denied making that concession, but, south of Long Island, construction on Empire Wind continues.