It is reproduced. For the second time this year, the Trump administration has interrupted the construction of a massive offshore wind farm built to feed blue states.
Friday, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Matthew Giacona, ordered the Danish wind developer Ørsted to stop all the constructions of the offshore project of the almost complete revolution so that the federal government can “respond to concerns related to the protection of national interests of the United States”. The Giacona, a former lobbyist of offshore oil and gas companies, did not specify the nature of these concerns.
This decision echoes an April Order of the Interior Department which stopped all the offshore work on the New York Empire Wind project.
The last time, the controversial break only lasted a month, but cost the developer nearly a billion dollars – and led the project to the edge of the cancellation. This time, with a person named Trump at the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or Boem, we do not know how long this expensive work potter could last.
Construction started on Revolution Wind in January 2024 and is now 80%complete, according to Ørsted. The wind farm is built off the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island in a “wind energy zone” designated by the federal government which was created after a five -year consultation between the State of Massachusetts, the coastal cities, the federal agencies and the branches of the army, in particular the American navy, the coastal guard and the body of the engineers.
Once the 704 megawatts project is completed, its cables will come to the ground in the Rhode Island and its carbon-free electricity will be introduced into the New England regional network and will serve the customers of the public services who saw their electricity bills soar last winter. It is one of the five offshore wind projects under construction in American waters. The country currently has only one offshore wind project on the scale of public services, South Fork, near Long Island, New York.
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President Donald Trump promised that America would “not” new windmills “on his watch. The order of Friday is only the last attempt to restore this commitment: in recent months, the Trump administration has killed offshore wind turbine rental, pause permits and tax credits at sunset essential to the economic viability of offshore wind farms.
The objective given for the work order on Friday – “national security interests” – has long -standing initiates of the wind industry scratching its head.
“No major military problem has been put in the foreground in New England,” said wind energy veteran Bill White in an interview with Canary Media. From 2009 to 2015, White represented the Massachusetts on an intergovernmental working group led by the Boem focused on the responsible location of offshore wind energy areas south of the Martha vineyard and the Nantucket Islands.
“The army was at the table, represented and consulted during this stakeholder process? The answer is: very good,” said White, who for a large part of his time in the working group worked for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center as main director of the offshore wind sector.
White – who then supervised the offshore wind as CEO of Avangrid offshore, one of the developers of the Vineyard Windyard de Massachusetts project – said that he was aware of the national security problems that have been raised on offshore wind projects near Maryland, Virginie and North Carolina, who have dotted ribs large military facilities.
In April 2023, for example, the Pentagon pointed out areas of wind energy offered along the central Atlantic coast as “very problematic”. But the Pentagon has not raised this kind of high -level concern about the wind of the revolution – or one of the projects under construction in the waters of New England, according to White. The Pentagon did not return a comment request.
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The development of the Revolution Wind Project began over ten years ago. In 2013, Deepwater Wind New England won a federal auction for two leases in the wind energy area designated by the intergovernmental working group; ØRSTED then acquired these leases when he bought the company. From 2016 to 2020, the Danish firm assessed the site and continued to hire stakeholders, such as local fishermen, according to Boem Records.
Between 2020 and 2023, Revolution Wind endured an in -depth regulatory examination, in particular the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration. Since wind turbines have the potential to affect radar and aeronautical navigation, the FAA has carried out an analysis of the airspace. The agency finally approved the project provided that all turbines are built according to the lighting and marking standards which would guarantee that they are visible for planes at night.
In August 2023, the body of American army engineers co-signed the authorization of plans for Ørsted to build 65 wind turbines for the Wind Project revolution. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also signed the authorization.
During the long way to go from Revolution Wind to construction, he received strong support from neighboring states, which have made ambitious commitments to renewable energies in recent years.
“The Trump administration order on revolutionary energy is undermining efforts to extend our energy supply, reduce costs for families and businesses and strengthen regional reliability,” said Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee, Democrat, in a statement.
In an article on X, McKee declared that he and the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, also a democrat, “will continue each avenue to overthrow the decision to stop the work on the wind of the revolution”. Lamont, in an Instagram post, described the order as “political decision”.
This new fight between the two governors and the federals could be played in the same way as the fight between the governor of New York Kathy Hochul and the Trump administration on the Empire Wind project earlier this year. After weeks of developer equinor threatening to move away from the interrupted project due to the high costs of delayed construction, the Trump administration reversed the course and raised the ban, claiming that it had concluded an agreement with Hochul, a democrat, to allow a natural gas pipeline to be built in the state.
The day the interior department raised the order, secretary Doug Burgum thanked Hochul in a social media position for his “desire to move forward on the critical capacity of the pipeline”. But a representative of the Hochul office told Canary Media at the time that no agreement on the natural gas pipeline had been concluded. “”
The Trump administration, including the administrator of the environmental protection agency, Lee Zeldin, has been pushed for New England and in particular Massachusetts to build new gas pipelines.
McKee and Lamont – or perhaps Ørsted – could also opt for a dispute, a road not taken by Hochul or Equinor during the drama of the wind of the Empire.
The Trump administration’s work order occurs while Ørsted seeks to raise billions of dollars from its shareholders to help finish the wind revolution and its other entirely authorized American project, Sunrise Wind, after other financing options have disappeared.
In the call of the results announcing the effort to collect funds earlier this month, Ørsted blamed its financial problems on “unexpected developments outside our will”. Now the European company is in shock from another unexpected blow from the Trump administration.
