It comes just after the election of Donald Trump, who has tried to stop an offshore wind farm that he said obscured the view from one of his Scottish golf courses, and as the Trump transition team at the Energy Department posed a controversial list of 74 questions to the agency, including the following: “What is the Department’s role with respect to the development of offshore wind?”

According to the New York Times, Trump, shortly after his election, spoke with British politician Nigel Farage and “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.”

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The Block Island project consists of five large offshore turbines supplied by GE Renewable Energy and is operated by Deepwater Wind. It drew some local resistance — including complaints about views — but has the backing of Rhode Island’s governor, Gina M. Raimondo.

On Block Island itself, which has about 1,000 full-time residents who have relied on diesel generators, some residents said not only that the turbines damaged the view but that the resulting electricity would be too pricey. Others supported the installation.

“We’ve been running on diesel generators for 80 years,” Norris Pik told The Washington Post earlier this year. “It’s time to turn them off.”

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Deepwater Wind’s chief executive, Jeff Grybowski, said in an interview with The Post: “Taking offshore wind from a theoretical thing to a reality is what Block Island has done. As the first project to cross the finish line, it’s really proven that offshore wind can be done in the United States. It has proven that the industry — and Deepwater as a company — can do what we say we can do.”

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He said that on an annual basis, the five turbines off Block Island should be able to produce enough electricity to power about 17,000 households. The company already is working on a 90-megawatt project, to be located off the east end of Long Island, that Grybowski said could be operational in about five years and would be the nation’s second offshore wind farm. Deepwater is also one of multiple companies that have proposed a project about 17 miles off the shore of Ocean City, Md.

Grybowski said he doesn’t worry that a Trump administration would do much to upend the growth of offshore wind power.

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“Our business is driven principally by what is happening in very individual markets,” he said. “It’s not driven very much by national policy.”

He acknowledged that any company hoping to build turbines offshore needs an array of state and federal permitting approvals. But he said traditionally that has been more of a legal process than one dictated by politics. “I don’t worry about our ability to get through that process,” he said.

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And yet it does appear that an unsympathetic administration could pose some hurdles. How do we know? Just ask the gung-ho Obama administration.

The administration recently published a national strategy to advance the industry, a joint document by the Energy and Interior departments. That document noted that it would be particularly important to ensure “efficiency, consistency and clarity in the regulatory process” for offshore wind, overseen by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management at the Interior Department. That department will soon be in the Trump administration’s hands.

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“Further work can be done to improve consistency and identify and reduce unnecessary burdens in BOEM’s existing regulatory process,” noted the Obama national strategy for offshore wind. “This may include establishing more predictable review timelines and maintaining a reasonable level of flexibility given the early stage of the industry’s development.”

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There are 10 other “active commercial leases” for U.S. offshore wind projects, according to the Energy and Interior departments’ report. The Energy Department, under Obama, forecast that by 2050, the United States could see 86 gigawatts (or 86 billion watts) of offshore wind capacity installed.