Decades of Investment and Expertise at Risk: The Impacts of Defunding Wind Programs in the FY27 Budget Proposal
Read this article on Substack.
By Jim Ahlgrimm, WETO alum; Mike Derby, WETO Alum; Kevin Lynn, EERE alum; Jocelyn Brown-Saracino, WETO alum; Paul Donohoo-Vallett, OP/EERE alum; and additional WETO alumni
The administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) budget proposes to zero out funding for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) wind program. This office represents fifty years of investment in research teams, institutional knowledge, and research infrastructure that has made the United States the world leader in wind innovation.DOE’s role in advancing applied R&D has driven breakthroughs not only in wind but across the broader energy landscape resulting in lowered barriers to deployment and ultimately lower energy costs to consumers. A national lab study found that DOE’s R&D investments in wind through 2017 has resulted in $31.4 billion in economic benefits - a positive return on investment with an 18 to 1 benefit-to-cost ratio. Eliminating the wind program limits the nation’s innovation capacity at precisely the moment when rapidly growing electricity demand and rising energy prices makes that capacity critical. A zero budget wind program would necessitate the closure of long-standing programs and expertise at the national labs and within the broader energy innovation ecosystem.
The Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) was funded at $100 million in the Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) budget enacted by Congress. As part of a DOE reorganization in 2025, WETO was merged with the Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) into a combined Integrated Energy Systems Office. In the FY27 budget request DOE proposes zero budget for this new combined office without providing any specific justification, generally citing Executive Order 14315 to say “the request takes a principled stand by rejecting federal subsidies that prop up intermittent energy sources.”
However, DOE’s wind energy program is not a subsidy to the wind industry. It is a strategic investment in innovation, domestic manufacturing, and the broader system to capture economic benefits and enable affordable, reliable, and sustainable electricity. DOE’s 2015 Wind Vision study identified key technology advancements and barriers that can be addressed with continued support for wind technology development, unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits like jobs and lower fuel purchases, avoided health impacts, and reduced environmental impacts like water consumption. Zeroing out the wind program would leave these benefits on the table.
Advancing Next Generation Wind Technologies
Wind is a significant portion of the current power system, together generating more than 10% of total bulk power in 2025 and delivering low-cost, clean electricity to consumers. This success is in part built upon decades of DOE investments enabling major cost reductions and addressing key logistical and system integration challenges.For example, the wind program has worked with industry partners to increase the performance and reliability of next-generation wind technologies while lowering the cost of wind energy. DOE funding for wind energy has been fundamental to the commercialization of the technology, with early work at DOE National Labs leading directly to the maturation and ascension of the three-blade turbine design. Recent wind initiatives are aimed at unlocking the next generation in wind technologies, including:
Optimized electricity production through wake steering: DOE investments are enabling better understanding of complex atmospheric flows through wind farms. This can let wind operators and planners optimize wind farm holistically, rather than trying to independently optimize each turbine. This maximizes energy production and holds the potential to increase revenue up to 4%, decreases wear and maintenance costs, and enables turbines to be placed closer together reducing land-use impacts.
Floating offshore wind platforms: Technical advances in floating platforms for off-shore wind turbines can enable them to operate in deep ocean waters further from shore and access stronger winds at higher altitudes in regions where lower average wind speeds make wind uneconomical with more traditional tower heights. Similarly, advances in manufacturing, next generation operational and maintenance techniques, and system scaling can reduce the cost of off-shore wind and make it an economically competitive option for coastal regions.
Enabling greater wind access through big turbines: Bigger wind turbines can access higher wind speeds and increase power output by 15-21%. The Big Adaptive Rotor initiative aimed at overcoming the physical and logistical limitations of massive land-based wind turbine blades, developing concepts for over 200 meter rotors. Other innovations like modular, 3D-printed concrete or wooden towers can bypass conventional road-transit limits and enable access to better wind resources.
There are significant advances in wind technologies to enable even more cost and performance improvements, even though the current generation of technologies are commercialized and deployed. DOE investments are crucial to unlocking these innovations and capturing the associated economic benefits. The Energy Information Administration’s recent Annual Energy Outlook 2026 demonstrated possible benefits of continued investments in improving wind cost and performance, with wind growing up to 25% of total electricity generation by 2035 and nearly reaching the 35% target identified as possible in DOE’s 2015 Wind Vision study.
Tackling Grid Integration Challenges that Support the Whole Power System
Growth in wind and increasing battery energy storage systems means an evolution in how power systems are planned and operated. DOE investments facilitate wind integration, supporting better power system planning and operations.
Improving wind forecasting to boost production and save money: The Wind Forecast Improvement Project gathers data to improve the ability to predict and understand operating conditions, and has directly informed updates to NOAA’s weather models. This resulted in substantial savings for utility companies and U.S. consumers, saving utilities between $32 million and $95 million annually by avoiding imbalance penalties and saving U.S. consumers over $380 million per year by lowering wholesale electricity prices and reducing the need to dispatch more expensive peaker plants.
Advancing transmission planning through system analysis to identify options that are affordable, reliable, and resilient. For example, a national lab-led analysis explored transmission topologies in the Atlantic waters to identify low-cost, high benefit pathways to support off-shore wind deployment and enhance grid reliability across the Eastern U.S. The specialized studies, data, and models developed become available to industry to incorporate into their own planning.
Developing standards for grid forming inverters: Wind and solar are inverter based resources that can deliver capabilities which in some cases exceed those of conventional machines, including faster frequency response, dynamic voltage support, and blackstart capability. Together with SETO, the DOE funded UNIFI Consortium aims to realize these benefits at scale, bringing together researchers, utilities, inverter manufacturers, and other stakeholders to create advances in grid-forming inverter technologies by conducting research, development, and demonstration as well as develop effective mechanisms for workforce training.Without federal investments and coordination, this type of work which supports reliable and resilient grid operations and planning is either delayed or left unaddressed.
Providing Science and Solutions to Enable Adoption in Ways that Work for Communities and Ecosystems
Challenges to wind and solar adoption are not limited to technology cost and performance. DOE invests in solutions to real world considerations and possible negative impacts for communities and ecosystems, to ensure communities have the option to benefit from use of low-cost, emissions-free technologies. DOE investment directly address these impacts:
Minimizing impact on wildlife and ecosystems: For decades, the wind program has been essential to keeping wind projects economically viable by convening key stakeholders and informing them on how to better understand and minimize impacts on wildlife and ecosystems. For example, the wind program has supported the refinement of smart curtailment systems that turn turbines off to protect bats, but limit downtime to periods of greatest risk, informed by sound science.
Investing in communities’ capacity to plan for and permit energy infrastructure: The Reliable Energy Siting through Technical Engagement and Planning effort directly supports states and communities in establishing more predictable, community-oriented, and science-based siting and permitting for wind, solar and other energy infrastructure projects. This builds capacity for local governments to address topics like environmental impacts, economic analysis, zoning ordinances, community engagement strategies, and fire safety and codes.
Improving new generator interconnection: Growth in wind and solar has been delayed by bottlenecks in the interconnection process affecting all generation technologies, not just renewables. DOE launched the Interconnection Innovation Exchange (i2X), led by both the solar and wind offices to support industry with innovations and tools to make the process more efficient.Without DOE investments in these areas it is more difficult to deploy low-cost wind and solar to meet electricity needs, and it creates a situation where communities and ecosystems are more vulnerable to negative impacts.
Ensuring Domestic Manufacturing to Support Economic Growth and Energy Security
Domestic manufacturing of wind and solar is critical both for energy security and to make sure we capture the economic benefits of technology innovation and development. DOE invests directly in programs to manufacture wind and solar domestically as well as associated workforce programs and advances in recycling technologies to reduce end-of-life impact and reclaim critical material. Key DOE investments in wind manufacturing and recycling:
Addressing “hard to recycle materials”: While about 90% of a turbine’s mass can be economically recycled the remaining materials—primarily fiber-reinforced composite blades and rare-earth magnets—pose major supply chain and technological challenges. To improve domestic supply chains and recycling capabilities for “tough-to-recycle” materials, DOE invested $20 million to help develop end-of-life processing technologies and accelerate the design of turbines that are more easily reusable. Through DOE-supported and industry-led initiatives, significant progress is being made for turbine blades.
Superconducting generators avoid rare earth elements: Compared to conventional copper-based or rare-earth magnet technologies, DOE-backed superconducting generators offer significant advantages such as massively reduced weight enabling far more compact and lightweight generators and supply chain security through avoiding use of rare-earth minerals otherwise found in permanent magnets. DOE funded GE Research to prototype the Ultra-Lightweight Superconducting Generator aiming to eliminates rare-earth materials, reduce turbine weight by 50%, and reduce wind generation costs by up to 10%.
Supporting wind workforce: The DOE wind program has long supported national scale wind workforce analyses and needs assessments, as well as programs to support the next generation of wind energy scientists including the Collegiate Wind Competition, which challenged students to design turbines, develop business plans, and a siting plan. The most recent year competition now focuses on blade recycling.Without these programs, DOE risks domestic innovations being scaled up and deployed elsewhere, with resulting lost economic benefits and lost energy security.
Long-Standing World-Class Expertise and Excellence in National Labs
Through bipartisan Congressional support of its national laboratories, DOE has invested in wind and solar R&D for close to 50 years. Through its world class engineers, scientists, and facilities, the national labs are the key enabler of a highly performing R&D program tackling difficult technical challenges to advancing technology cost, performance, and integration. A DOE multi-year planning process including input from industry and academia identifies the most critical research needs of industry and a research program that addresses the expertise, infrastructure, and partnerships required for implementation.
National labs have cultivated competent, technical laboratory staff as a top priority. These personnel assets are valuable resources to industry for solving the trickiest of problems.The labs provide national and international leadership and deliver cutting edge R&D like the development of validated wind turbine design codes and models used around the world to design safe, efficient, and ever larger wind turbines. Laboratories use their technical prowess to convene expert working groups to address hard-to-solve issues.
The labs have been instrumental in proving new wind technologies ready for commercialization. Often this involves pre-deployment testing using costly, full scale test devices such as a wind turbine blade test facility capable of load testing 100 meter wind turbine blades through a series of static and dynamic tests. No individual company has the where-with-all to develop these large facilities on their own and much of that infrastructure has been developed at the national labs. But the labs cannot continue to fulfill the role with respect to wind and solar without funding stability. New commercial designs as a result will receive less testing and may be deployed at a higher risk for design or operational challenges.
Labs are key partners on university and private sector projects, multiplying economic impacts. A dollar invested by DOE is often matched with cost share from industry and academic sources. This can often result in a doubling or tripling of the DOE investment. This government and industry coordinated approach, underpins much of the wind innovation ecosystem in the US.
An example of a coordinated project across DOE, labs, industry, and academia is the RAAW project. RAAW (Rotor Aerodynamics, Aeroelastics & Wakes) program is a DOE led field experiment and model validation campaign designed to optimize wind energy production by measuring the highly complex forces that impact wind turbines. RAAW produces detailed data sets for studying blade deflection, aerodynamic loads, and wind wakes to refine structural designs and improve wind simulation codes, which are freely available to researchers and industry innovators.
Funding from DOE also advances a culture of university research that has been instrumental in driving wind energy advancement in the U.S. From the early days of wind energy research stemming from the University of Massachusetts, to the ARROW program in 2024 and many other programs, this body of university research helps advance the U.S. leadership role in engineering, power electronics, and manufacturing research.
The Lasting Impacts of Defunding DOE Wind Programs
Elimination of the WETO budget will result in the loss of these programs and the loss of future benefits of wind advancement on energy affordability, security, and health and environmental impacts and ultimately affect U.S. R&D competitiveness on the global scale and risk creating a gap where international competitors can assume control of technology leadership. These capabilities and expertise have been built up over decades of sustained investment, and once lost will be nearly impossible to rebuild or replicate.
###
This piece was drafted by trusted and vetted alumni of the U.S. Department of Energy. Any views and opinions expressed are that of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the DOE Alumni Network.
