What happened in between matters. In its rush to stop a wind project, the Trump administration exposed the first cracks in its anti-wind policy agenda — a loss that may embolden companies targeted by the crackdown on renewable energy development to fight back.
Orsted, the Danish wind giant, was more than halfway done building Revolution Wind by August 22, the day the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordered an immediate stop to construction. In a one-page letter explaining the order, the agency dedicated a single paragraph to the rationale behind its decision: “BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” it said.
Orsted filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government within days and asked for a preliminary injunction against the stop-work order. The Trump administration had acted arbitrarily when it halted construction on Revolution Wind, the company argued, a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces the government to have at least some sensible reason for its decision-making.
There were urgent financial stakes to the court’s decision, the company said. On top of strict timelines for completing the project that were laid out in power purchase agreements, the cable installation company working on Revolution Wind has just a brief window before it is booked for other projects through mid-2028. Unless the judge acted quickly, according to Orsted, Revolution Wind could face “project cancellation and termination of the enterprise,” at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.
After Orsted filed its suit, the attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island — two of the three states designated to receive electricity from Revolution Wind — soon followed course. The Trump administration responded by doubling down on its claims related to national defense. Revolution Wind, officials argued, would negatively impact radar detection and result in dangerous electromagnetic emissions. They also asserted that Defense Department officials were overruled or ignored when they raised concerns about this matter in the review process for the project, which received its final permits in 2023. (It’s worth noting the Trump administration’s legal filings refer to the military as the Department of War, or DOW.)
The Department of the Interior’s acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, Adam Suess, told the court on September 12 in a sworn declaration that Revolution Wind had not fully addressed a host of concerns. Suess elaborated on the stop work order, asserting that it concerned the project’s “continued inability to reach certain mitigation agreements” with the military and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Suess stated Revolution Wind was not in full compliance with the terms of its construction and operations plan, which are subject to government approval. He also said there were outstanding issues with Revolution Wind’s coordination with military operators at sea, and that there was still “risk from distributed optical fiber sensing and acoustic monitoring equipment.
“The Department has been in touch with NOAA and the DOW to gather more information,” the filing said, somewhat cryptically.
Suess also acknowledged that the Trump administration is reconsidering its prior green lights for Revolution Wind, including its approval of the construction and operations plan, linking this to a broader all-of-government review of the offshore wind industry Trump ordered on Day One via executive order.
In response, Orsted called the government’s bluff. The company submitted sworn declarations from top company officials who had worked on Revolution Wind, attesting to the fact that before Trump came into office, the military and NOAA were saying everything looked A-OK.
“Mr. Suess’ declaration makes new allegations against Revolution Wind that were not mentioned in the stop work order,” Orsted’s attorneys wrote in their reply. “These new allegations are factually inaccurate and controverted by Revolution Wind’s compliance with project requirements.”
One of Orsted’s declarations was from Melanie Gearon, the company’s head of northeast permitting. Suess had claimed that Revolution Wind was far from reaching a critical agreement with NOAA’s Fisheries division, known as the National Marine Fisheries Service, to mitigate the effects of sea surveys on fishing vessels. But Gearon painted a completely different picture, detailing years of negotiations with NOAA and BOEM about how to handle the surveys.
These talks had apparently continued months into the Trump administration. Orsted submitted an email from BOEM to the company dated July 9, in which an official explicitly says that agency staff were discussing scenarios where Orsted could just “state that they are continuing to work with [the National Marine Fisheries Service] on a Survey Mitigation agreement, which could still be submitted at a later date.” Gearon said the company had received “updated cost modeling” from the agency as recently as September 9, days before Suess’ comments were submitted in court.
Then came the comments from Orsted’s head of marine affairs, Edward LeBlanc, who served in the military for decades and worked on offshore energy oversight. He told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.
“To date, Revolution Wind has never received a notice or any indication that it has failed to coordinate with DOD regarding its offshore activities, or that the U.S. Navy or DOD has any concerns with the ongoing coordination,” LeBlanc stated.
It was after this filing that the justice overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, approved the preliminary injunction and lifted the stop-work order.
As long as offshore wind has existed there has been tension with the U.S. military over use of the sea, and it is true that turbines could hinder radar detection.
In 2011, the Defense Department established a “clearinghouse” to resolve any potential issues with ocean energy development of any kind, whether oil, gas, or wind power. The clearinghouse reviews more than 5,000 projects every year, and its activities include regular give and take with the Interior Department and Federal Aviation Administration. One of the many pieces of evidence Orsted submitted in the Revolution Wind case was a December 2024 letter from the clearinghouse stating the project “would not have adverse impacts to DOD missions in the area.”
Josh Kaplowitz, an environmental attorney who represents renewable energy companies including offshore wind developers, and who previously worked in the Interior Department solicitor’s office, told me: “There is not a single situation I am aware of where the Defense Department ever requested something and the approving agency said, ‘No, we’re going to do something else.’”
“There are some problems with coming in after the fact and coming up with post hoc national security rationalizations when the process of review was so rigorous,” Kaplowitz said.
Independent analysis has also cleared the military’s consultation with offshore wind permitting agencies of having any serious issues.
Earlier this year the Government Accountability Office — a quasi-independent watchdog under the control of Congress — released a detailed review of the offshore wind industry’s federal permitting process. The review was requested by one of the sector’s biggest adversaries in Congress, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, who has been heavily involved in fighting offshore wind development in his home state.
Smith, a Republican, ultimately celebrated the review’s publication because it pointed out certain ways offshore wind could impact radar detection and military readiness. In his public statements, however, the lawmaker left out a key detail of the report — that it raised no issues with interactions between the military and offices involved in greenlighting offshore wind projects. In fact, it went into great detail on the lengths researchers and government officials had gone toward solving these potential problems.
“We didn’t have any recommendations there,” Frank Russo, director of GAO’s natural resources department, told me in an interview. “It seemed like coordination was going well, that DOD was satisfied with what was going on, and if there were concerns they could be mitigated.”
Russo said that Defense officials had for years been involved in offshore wind leasing, meaning that military staff from the Navy and Coast Guard had already weighed in on potential safety and readiness problems before companies even knew where they were allowed to build, and certainly prior to the project-specific permitting stage.
“At the very start of it, they know where their main concerns are,” Russo said of the Defense Department’s role in offshore wind development.
The Interior Department normally declines to comment on pending litigation. But I still wanted to ask Interior to comment on the assertions from Russo that the Interior Department and military were properly handling the security implications of offshore wind. It felt especially important to ask them about this because Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month explained the Revolution Wind stop work order on national TV by claiming radar interference would leave the country vulnerable to “swarm attacks” from underwater drones.
Tory Peabody, a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management spokesperson, provided the following statement to Heatmap: “As a result of the court’s decision, Revolution Wind will be able to resume construction as BOEM continues its investigation into possible impacts by the project to national security and prevention of other uses on the Outer Continental Shelf. The Department of the Interior remains committed to ensuring that prior decisions are legally and factually sound.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from BOEM, and to remove an errant “not” in the second-to-last paragraph.
California Academy of Sciences
