The US Department of the Interior (DOI) has announced the end of “preferential treatment” for wind and solar energy, introducing additional layers of review and eliminating longstanding fee discounts for related projects.
The decision follows President Trump’s signing of Executive Order 14315, which directed federal agencies to remove financial support for intermittent renewable energy sources, and the enactment of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
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The DOI will now subject decisions and actions related to wind and solar energy facilities to an “elevated review” by the Office of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. This includes leases, rights-of-way, construction and operation plans, grants, consultations and biological opinions.
The Interior Department also said it would eliminate right-of-way and capacity-fee discounts for existing and future wind and solar projects on public lands, implementing provisions of the OBBBA.
“Today’s actions further deliver on President Trump’s promise to tackle the Green New Scam and protect the American taxpayers’ dollars,” said acting assistant secretary for lands and minerals management Adam Suess.
“American energy dominance is driven by US-based production of reliable baseload energy, not regulatory favouritism towards unreliable energy projects that are solely dependent on taxpayer subsidies and foreign-sourced equipment.”
The move reverses fee reductions introduced by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under the Biden administration, which cut capacity fees for wind and solar projects on federal lands by 80% compared with previous rates. The new framework under the OBBBA sets the capacity fee at the greater of the applicable acreage rent or 3.9% of a project’s gross electricity sales, subject to limited exceptions.
In May, the DOI announced its intention to rescind the BLM’s Renewable Energy Rule, which established the fee reductions.
These developments reflect the Trump administration’s broader energy agenda to reduce federal support for renewable energy in favour of dispatchable sources such as natural gas and coal. The administration argues that wind and solar are unreliable, economically unviable without subsidies and vulnerable to foreign supply chains.
“There are indeed supply chain vulnerabilities,” says Paul Hasselbrinck, senior energy analyst at GlobalData. “Solar and wind require critical materials that China overwhelmingly dominates.”
For instance, China is responsible for nearly 40% of the global share of processing for copper, used not only for solar and wind but also, albeit far less, for nuclear, coal and gas power. Meanwhile, the Asian nation holds around 90% of global processing capacity for manganese, essential to manufacturing wind turbines.
The economic case, however, is debatable. Lazard’s 2025 Levelized Cost of Energy report revealed that, even without subsidies, utility-scale solar and onshore wind stand as the most cost-competitive technologies. The bank said that renewables will hence be critical to meeting rising US power demand as “the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy generation”.
The rapid expansion of energy storage is also helping address renewables’ intermittency challenge. “Though storage doesn’t necessarily replace the need for firm capacity, co-located batteries do make wind and solar projects increasingly reliable sources of energy,” Hasselbrinck comments.
“It appears President Trump’s practical, if not simplistic, approach to ‘energy dominance’ does not take all these factors into account.”
