A new poll finds solid support among Eastern Shore residents for offshore wind, with strong majorities convinced wind projects will benefit jobs, improve health conditions and support American energy independence.
The poll was sponsored by Shore Progress, an Eastern Shore regional advocacy group, and conducted by Gonzales Research & Media Services, Inc., a respected polling firm based in Annapolis.
The poll found that among Eastern Shore residents, 51% support building offshore wind farms off the coast of Maryland, while 37% say they would oppose them, with 12% giving no opinion. The poll found that 54% of Shore residents support a goal of moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources, such as offshore wind, with 39% opposed and 7% offering no opinion.
- Respondents agreed by significant margins that offshore wind would have positive impacts in several areas, including 70 percent who agreed that offshore wind would have a positive benefit on jobs and 67 percent who said it would provide health benefits.
- Agreed that offshore wind would bring benefits in five other key areas:
- Air and water quality: 66% – 27%
- Electricity prices: 65% – 25%
- Energy independence: 65% – 26%
- Electricity reliability: 61% — 31%
- Climate change: 56% — 31%
- On the question of whether offshore wind would have a positive impact on ocean ecosystems and marine life, respondents were evenly split; 43%-43% with 14% undecided.
“The results are clear, Eastern Shore voters strongly support building an offshore wind farm off our coast,” said Jared Schablein, Chair of Shore Progress. “The U.S. Wind project is a huge investment in our community. It will bring good-paying jobs and help us become energy independent at a time when energy bills are skyrocketing. It’s time to move forward with clean energy, lower costs, and good jobs for the Shore.”
U.S. Wind is pursuing an offshore wind farm well off the coast of Ocean City. The project would build 114 wind turbines, generating more than 2 gigawatts of clean electricity—enough to power over 718,000 Maryland homes, with zero greenhouse gas emissions. The project has secured federal and state permits and could begin construction in 2025.
The poll was conducted by Gonzales Research & Media Services, Inc. from December 27, 2024, through January 6, 2025, sampling 404 registered voters on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in Maryland Senate Districts 36, 37, and 38. The margin of error on these questions is plus or minus 5 percentage points. If the entire population in the region was surveyed, there is a 95% probability that the true numbers would fall within this range.
Lauren says
I absolutely do not support offshore wind!
Dorothy Lane says
Id like to see how many were polled and where you got their names. This so called poll was not a random poll. When real facts about wind energy are research the majority are not for them. You didn’t poll me. What was your criteria for deciding who to poll?
Jen Pawloski says
This poll is a joke. Poll the eastern shore between Christmas and the first week of January when everyone is focused on the holidays and when the snowbirds are out of town.
Trey says
You are all sick, obviously this a scam. Can’t believe you get to calm this a poll when reality over 90 percent of us along shore don’t want this which is why you shills had to force nj bill s3926 on us local towns to force it thru and take away our rights/“home rule” to have any say in this. I hope You all get arrested for your obvious traitorous actions. How much did it take for you all to betray your fellow citizen? Destroying our best gifts is beyond madness. Karma. Keep gaslighting us with this scam, see how that helps your reputation. Seriously shameful putting up these fake polls.
Brian Kelly says
Offshore wind is a total boondoggle. It is not clean or green. It is just very expensive energy at the cost of the environment.
MaryBeth Petroski says
This could not be further from the truth. Stop printing opinions. No one ever wanted this, voted for this or was ever even notified of this looming diaster. Your”green” $$$ deal is the worst idea that destroys everything in it’s path. The blatant lies and rhetoric that back this insanity are just appalling. Anyone that lends credit to this travesty should no longer be able to publish. You should be ashamed.
Carol Frazier says
This “poll” by Shore Progress is a joke.
An honest poll would show Eastern Shore opposition to OSW in the neighborhood of 70-80%.
I have attended numerous “information”events conducted by BOEM and MDE and the only Pro- OSW attendees were wearing “Sierra Club” T shirts.
You need to ask yourselves why you fell for this load of crap.
Charles says
The eastern shore absolutely does not support offshore wind! I go to the public hearings and 98% of everyone there are against offshore wind! You must have done you poll in PG county.
Cooper F says
This is completely false. How about providing the specifics in these polls. Nobody wants it and it’s being rammed down our throats. Would have to think that this publication is connected to Annapolis. The Governor of Maryland and his team are trying to shove this through. It’s a horrible deal, nobody wants it with zero benefit to the local communities run by an international company. Say no to offshore wind!
Jody Perry says
I do not support offshore wind!!!
Richard says
This “poll” was a political psyop job. It oversampled people un affected by the windmills in order to get the reult they wanted. Try polling areas within 15 miles of the coast line!
Dianna Harris says
Dear Editor,
I find myself both laughing and crying after reading the recent article—New polling finds strong Eastern Shore support for offshore wind laughing due to its absurdity and crying because it reflects how journalism has all but vanished. Was this piece simply a reprint of a press release from Gonzales? If the Chestertown Spy truly cared about the issue at hand, the editorial team, at the very least, would have questioned the results of a poll commissioned by such a patrician entity.
More importantly, the Spy would have understood that Ocean City—the economic engine of Maryland—is locked in a battle for its survival against US Wind. This proposed project threatens not only Ocean City’s tourism, but also the economic health of Worcester and Sussex Counties, and by extension, the entire state of Maryland and Delaware.
I would encourage the “Spy Desk” to read the Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for these projects, which outline the numerous negative consequences, including the disturbing fact that the projects “will have no positive impact” on the environment. On the contrary, studies from reputable institutions such as Duke University show a potential reduction in tourism rates by as much as 15-50%. For a town like Ocean City, which regularly hosts 350,000 visitors over a summer weekend and now enjoys an extended tourist season into October, this would be catastrophic.
This article fails to address key inconsistencies. For example, the document suggests air quality will improve, yet it fails to explain why US Wind still needs an “air pollution” permit from MDE. Moreover, residents can already see the strain on their electric bills due to soaring energy costs driven by rapid tax subsidies for “green energy,” which has not yet been built. Meanwhile, Maryland must rely on energy imported from other states and even Canada at inflated prices as it prematurely closes base load power supplies. How environmentally friendly is it for Maryland to depend on energy from Canada?
Ocean City’s tourism industry, including events like the White Marlin Open, Oceans Calling, SunFest, and Bike Week, generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The combined impact of these events—over a half billion dollars—would be severely threatened by a 15% reduction in tourism, particularly at a time when the state is already facing a $3 billion budget deficit. Worcester County alone stands to lose $4.6 million in room tax revenue, which ripples through the state economy. This loss directly threatens funding for local schools, as Worcester County relies on state funding for less than 20% of its educational budget, one of the lowest percentages in Maryland.
Turning to the environmental impacts, the proposed wind farm threatens critical ecosystems. The transmission cables, which will pass through the Shuster Horseshoe Crab Sanctuary and Indian River, will irreparably damage these habitats. Horseshoe crab blood is a vital resource used in medical testing to ensure the safety of vaccines and medical equipment—what happens to this resource if its habitat is destroyed?
Additionally, the proposed project directly threatens endangered species like the Red Knot, whose primary food source is horseshoe crab eggs. The loss of this species’ foraging grounds, combined with the destruction of benthic habitats, will have far-reaching consequences for the ecosystem. The EIS suggests the impact will be “short-term,” but a multi-year construction project raises serious questions: How long is “short-term”? Will the ecosystem survive the disruption?
Let’s not forget the endangered Common Tern, which depends on Assateague Island as its primary breeding ground. The wind farm’s construction may block the Tern’s ability to access this critical habitat, which could jeopardize the survival of the species.
There is also the pressing issue of the dead whales washing up along our beaches—something government agencies continue to dismiss. Researchers like Apostolos Gerasoulis have gathered evidence linking wind farms to these strandings, although the government has failed to acknowledge this correlation fully. Why isn’t this being reported?
I do recall, Kent County’s successful effort to save its goose hunting industry from the onshore wind. The “Spy Desk” might want to consider the impact on Ocean City’s commercial fishing industry, which generates over $7 million annually. US Wind’s plans to take over the harbor and replace fishing boats with massive crew transfer vessels would end this industry. Imagine 7,000 diesel-fueled trips per year for turbine maintenance. And the construction of a 353-foot cement dock and landing area that will destroy over 44,000 square feet of pervious land and water, replacing it with concrete and storage for fossil fuels and chemicals.
The community has spoken, and the Worcester County Commissioners are fighting to prevent this project from destroying our harbor, not out of fear or opposition to renewable energy, but because we are being asked to sacrifice our way of life for an Italian-owned company seeking taxpayer-funded subsidies. We do not want to see our local economy wrecked, nor do we want US Wind as our neighbor after the company threatened to bankrupt Worcester County and its commissioners personally if they did not allow this project to move forward.
Finally, it is timely for my response to this article, that just as I received this letter on energy policy from Meghan Lapp, a leader in the fishing industry and a key figure in the Supreme Court case that struck down the Chevron Doctrine. I’ve included the full text below.
If the Chestertown Spy is committed to honest journalism, it must fully explore the local economic and environmental consequences of the US Wind project and provide a balanced perspective on this critical issue. I am happy to provide links to critical information such as Professor Gerasoulis’ work, Rand Acoustic’s research and Save Right Whale’s research.
Meghan Lapp’s Review
“Since the Department of Energy is one of the agencies tapped by President Trump’s Day One Executive Order “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects” to aid in the Department of Interior review of currently permitted or leased offshore wind projects, it will be critical that the Secretary of Energy take a hard look at how the previous Biden Administration review of existing offshore leases and projects not only ignored reliability, affordability and national security, but actually buried these concerns, to the detriment of the nation.
Let’s take a look at each of Secretary Wright’s three criteria and how offshore wind measures up- the third might surprise you:
1. Reliable: Offshore wind is not a reliable, long-lived, or dispatchable source of power. In 2023 for the first time, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) identified “Energy Policy”, i.e. the reliance on renewables, for the first time as a risk to the stability of the continental grid, which obviously has serious consequences on reliability.
The intermittency of offshore wind power is a well-known fact; what is not as well known is that the more offshore wind is built, the less effective it becomes. As offshore wind farms grow larger and more numerous, energy production actually drops due to the wind wake effects from turbine to turbine, causing as much as a 20% drop in power production for wind farms within 50 km of each other and up to 28.9% within a wind farm itself, lowering energy production and efficiency, and requiring more backup power.
Wind droughts are common in Europe, causing astronomical electricity price spikes and putting consumers at risks of blackouts and exposure to freezing temperatures due to European reliance on offshore wind power. As recently as January 2025, U.K. households faced blackouts as wind power plummeted due to freezing weather; in 2021 due to a lack of wind German authorities taught the public to heat their homes with candles and cook without electricity.
In the U.S., projects cannot be built if they face simple performance guarantees. An offshore wind developer’s project off Virginia claimed it would average a 42% capacity factor of energy production, but when regulators suggested a performance guarantee based on a 42% three year rolling average capacity factor in order to protect ratepayers from unexpected cost increases, the developer immediately responded saying that such a performance guarantee would force them to “terminate” the project.
Offshore wind is so unreliable that developers are not even willing to enter into performance guarantees based off of their own numbers. Offshore wind is highly exposed to the elements, more so than onshore wind, resulting in rapid degradation of project components and decreased output over time. On average, offshore wind farm power output declines by 4.5% annually, losing nearly 50% of its power output within 10 years of construction.
Reliable? No.
2. Affordable: Offshore wind has the highest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of any power source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, when the intermittency of offshore wind power (not considered by LCOE) is factored into the equation, costs soar even higher.
In New England, one analysis put the all-in cost of offshore wind power up to 12 times that of natural gas.
Offshore wind cannot survive without massive subsidies, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere. When Denmark, one of the foremost nations promoting offshore wind, decided to forgo subsidies for offshore wind in 2024, it received zero bids on its offshore wind lease auction. The same occurred in the U.K. in 2023.
In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act currently provides a 30% Investment Tax Credit for the capital cost of offshore wind projects, with additional tax subsidies allowing projects to be subsidized up to 50% of costs. The capital cost of unreliable offshore wind being subsidized is nearly 6 times that of reliable combined cycle natural gas, with twice the operations and maintenance costs, according to one developer.
Even with massive subsidies from U.S. taxpayers to “offset” these costs, offshore wind companies in recent years have continually canceled U.S. contracts and rebid these same contracts at higher electricity rates to consumers. The cost of offshore wind is going up, not down.
Affordable? No.
3. Secure: Offshore wind directly interferes with national defense and maritime security, thereby posing actual security risks. In 2022, the U.S. Navy stated that the entirety of BOEM’s planned offshore wind leases in the Central Atlantic would impact its missions and in 2017 had ruled the majority of the East Coast a “Wind Exclusion Zone”- including areas currently leased and permitted for offshore wind development.
In 2019, the Undersecretary of Defense acknowledged that U.S. long range air surveillance radar is “very susceptible” to interference from offshore wind turbines and that submarines could possibly also be affected. The DOD and BOEM have stated that terminal area air traffic control radar, defense long range air surveillance radars, weather radars, ground based military unique radars, and missile tracking radars will all be impacted by offshore wind.
Wind turbines cause clutter and false targets on radar, causing actual targets to be missed and/or masked; the interference increases with the size and number of turbines. In 2016, the federal interagency Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Working Group released their first “strategy” to “fully address by 2025” the radar interference caused by wind turbines. They have found no solutions, only discovered more radar related problems, and have since extended “the timeline to accomplish the objectives of the 2016 strategy…to 2035”.
Meanwhile, these important federal agencies like the DOD, FAA and USCG routinely defer to BOEM (which permits offshore wind projects) as the “lead agency” on all offshore wind permitting issues, leaving critical security issues including radar interference to take a back seat to offshore wind development. One offshore wind farm scheduled for imminent construction is not only directly sited on a USCG Weapons Training Area but will also interfere with JFK Airport’s air surveillance radar on the approach to N.Y.- which BOEM admits will “allow aircraft to hide within these false targets, making detection of an aircraft difficult while over the wind farm.”
The recent N.J./N.Y. drone activity highlights the importance of preserving radar integrity. In 2024, Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea because the wind farm radar interference would reduce Sweden’s missile defense system detection time by half and made submarine detection more difficult. In 2024, Estonia also declared that offshore wind installations pose security threats for Estonia and NATO, with radar interference creating a “barrier” to military operations affecting both combat units and rescue operations, impacting drone detection and missile launches.
At sea, the USCG has already been forced to abort one helicopter search and rescue mission that resulted in loss of life partially due to “hazards in the area (i.e. wind farm),” and the USCG to this day has still not conducted any evaluation of marine radar interference on its own vessel or mission capabilities despite the fact that its vessels will experience marine radar interference due to offshore wind turbines. In 2022, the National Academies of Sciences released a report entitled, ““Wind Turbine Generator Impacts to Marine Vessel Radar”, which confirmed that wind turbine interference “decreases the effectiveness of [marine vessel radar] mounted on all vessel classes, and the sizes of anticipated marine [wind] farms across the U.S. OCS will exacerbate this situation” and offered no immediate solutions, only suggestions for future study.
Secure? No.
Hopefully, all these issues will be noticed by Secretary Wright’s Department of Energy offshore wind review pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order. They are big issues, and ones that should have precluded U.S. offshore wind leasing and development in the first place. The good thing is it’s not too late to reverse course.”
James Dissette says
Thank you for detailed and sourced rebuttal. I published this as a legitimate press-release without asking about their polling data. I’d like to turn this into a plus by inviting you to send this comment as a Letter to the Editor to offer this information to our readers.
Tom says
Utter joke of a poll. Embarrassing to even call this a poll
Nick Allen says
Not sure who you polled, but I have yet to meet one resident of the eastern shore between Hebron and Ocean City who supports wind turbines in the ocean. Maybe you should take this poll somewhere besides between Easton and Chestertown and you would get an accurate representation of the shore. Not the DMV.
Chris Connolly says
No one in the eastern shore is in support of offshore wind. It is over priced and unreliable means of producing electricity. Why would anyone in their right mind support building a infrastructure that is less than 50% efficiency and is meant to be a fair weather way to support the main power generation
Gren Whitman says
Ha, ha, someone begged their little friends to write LTEs to the Spy, didn’t they?
Gonzales polling not only predicted Larry Hogan would win, it also preidcted that D. Trump would win in 2016, so the firm is no leftie tool.
Sure, there’s a contingent of folks — with its epicenter in OC — that are exercised about offshore wind installations and are doing their very best to stir up opposition.
There are folks opposed to massed solar collecters on farmland, too (I’m one of them).
I especially like the LTE that says, “I do not support offshore wind,” as if “supporting” wind were possible. Also the one that claims the Gonzales poll is not valid because she wasn’t asked.
Anyway, if Gonzales ever asks me, I’ll say I think harvesting the wind is a great idea, and when are they going to start harvesting the tides, too?
Dianna Harris says
Read the EIS and then let us know your thoughts.
Gren Whitman says
Still waiting to hear from you, hon, exactly how offshore wind turbines will adversely affect OC’s hallowed “Bike Week.”
Eric says
I’m am Strongly against OSW off the coast of Md. & De.
Politicians should not industrialize our oceans and coastline with wind turbines.
Keep Our Oceans Ocean!