The Trump administration has frozen approvals for wind and solar projects on federal lands and water for at least 60 days.

Walter Cruickshank, the acting head of the Interior Department, issued the order on Monday, which blocks the government from issuing any leases, rights of way, contracts, or “any other agreement required to allow for renewable energy development.”

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Trump separately signed an executive order directing the Treasury Department to freeze new offshore wind leases, and directed a review of turbines' impact. While solar and onshore wind can still be built on non-federal land, offshore wind requires federal approval.

Utility Dominion said that it believes its $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind farm, which will help power the state home to the world's largest concentration of data centers, has progressed far enough not to be impacted by the block - but other projects are at risk.

There are concerns some leases may be canceled, and various US states' plans to run on renewable energy have been thrown into disarray. New Jersey aims to deploy 11GW of offshore wind by 2040, while New York was expecting to field 9GW by 2035.

On and offshore wind makes up around 10 percent of US electricity, the largest renewable energy type, and employs around 131,000 people.

"We don't want windmills in this country," Trump told Fox News. "We're putting an order on it. I've already sort of done it. We don't want windmills... you know what else people don't like? Those massive solar fields."

The moves to slow the development of clean energy, which is often the cheapest form of power, is at odds with President Trump's declaration of a “national energy emergency."

In an executive order signed on Monday, Trump said that "generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs." The order added: "We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy."

On Thursday, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Trump erroneously claimed that the US needed to double its total grid capacity to support AI, and said that data centers could be powered by “anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup." He has also called for an oil and gas drilling boom.

During the same speech, Trump claimed that colocating data centers and energy facilities “was largely my idea."

He added: “Nobody thought this was possible … I told them that what I want you to do is build your electric generating plant right next to your plant as a separate building connected.”

This idea has existed for some time.

Talen began building a data center next to a nuclear power plant in 2021, which AWS bought last year; Entergy is building a gas plant to power Meta's 2GW Louisiana data center; cryptominers have long colocated near stranded energy; hyperscalers are now looking to deploy small modular reactors nearby.