States and Businesses Push Back on Federal Attack on Clean Wind Energy

Just days after a federal judge struck down a previous anti-wind energy order, Trump’s minions tried again to wage his obsessive war against clean offshore wind energy.

Trump’s puppet at the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum, announced December 22 that his department was placing a “pause” on five major wind energy projects off the Atlantic coast, alleging “national security” concerns. The five projects are all fully permitted with construction in progress, and some are only weeks away from going fully online to deliver electricity into the grid. The projects are the Vineyard Wind project under construction in Massachusetts, Revolution Wind in Rhode Island and Connecticut, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, and two projects in New York: Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind. 

Challenging the Trump Administration

Dominion Energy, developer of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, filed a legal challenge the next day, citing the “arbitrary and capricious” and unconstitutional nature of the Interior Department order. 

Dominion Energy’s complaint, filed in federal court in Virginia, asserted that the “pause” order was causing “immediate, irreparable harm” and $5 million in damages a day to the company while construction was suspended. The company asked for an order pausing Interior’s own stop-work order and allowing project construction to continue while the case was heard. Meanwhile, the Democratic governors of several impacted states began work on a coordinated challenge to the order against all five projects. 

And in an unusual warning, the operator of the regional electric grid in New England said that it was counting on one of the impacted projects (Vineyard Wind) to provide heat and electricity to customers this winter. Any delays to that wind farm or to Revolution Wind, which is more than 80 percent completed, “will increase costs and risks to reliability in our region,” it said.

Baseless Claims; Energy Emergency

The co-author of a 2024 Brown University study which debunked claims against offshore wind projects on national defense grounds called the latest Interior Department order “bonkers.” J. Timmons Roberts, an environmental studies and sociology professor at Brown University, elaborated that “These claims aren’t new and they have been, in the past, shown to be quite baseless.” 

“This so-called ‘pause’ on offshore wind makes no sense and is an escalation of the Administration’s ongoing, baseless attacks on clean energy. Even as the administration says we are in an energy emergency, it is undermining the cleanest, cheapest and fastest-to-deploy sources of energy. When people are shocked at their monthly electricity bills, I hope they know to point their fingers straight at the White House,” said Pasha Feinberg, offshore wind strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “The five offshore wind projects that were paused today have been under development for more than a decade and were fully approved and permitted by the federal government. Offshore wind developers worked directly with the Department of Defense throughout the process.” 

“Pausing fully-permitted offshore wind projects at the finish line doesn’t just strand billions of dollars at sea,” said Katie Segal, Senior Offshore Wind Director at Environmental League of Massachusetts and Regional Lead at New England for Offshore Wind. “It strands American workers, undermines our energy security, increases our energy bills, and sends a chilling message that no infrastructure project in this country is safe from political whim.” 

Julie Tighe, President of New York League of Conservation Voters, added, “The New York projects alone would inject more than 1.7 gigawatts of clean, reliable, stable energy – enough to power more than 1.1 million homes. Stopping these projects now – when energy demand is rising and the president himself is claiming there is an energy emergency – makes no sense. The national security objections brought by the administration are absurd and we know that this attempt, like all those before it, will fail.”