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A new PowerLines report puts the total requested increases at $31 billion — more than double the number from 2024.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that construction on Vineyard Wind could proceed.
The Secretary of Energy announced the cuts and revisions on Thursday, though it’s unclear how many are new.
Mikie Sherrill used her inaugural address to sign two executive orders on energy.
A third judge rejected a stop work order, allowing the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project to proceed.
The decision marks the Trump administration’s second offshore wind defeat this week.
A federal court has lifted Trump’s stop work order on the Empire Wind offshore wind project, the second defeat in court this week for the president as he struggles to stall turbines off the East Coast.
In a brief order read in court Thursday morning, District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee — sided with Equinor, the Norwegian energy developer building Empire Wind off the coast of New York, granting its request to lift a stop work order issued by the Interior Department just before Christmas.
Interior had cited classified national security concerns to justify a work stoppage. Now, for the second time this week, a court has ruled the risks alleged by the Trump administration are insufficient to halt an already-permitted project midway through construction.
Anti-offshore wind activists are imploring the Trump administration to appeal this week’s injunctions on the stop work orders. “We are urging Secretary Burgum and the Department of Interior to immediately appeal this week’s adverse federal district court rulings and seek an order halting all work pending appellate review,” Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, said in a statement texted to me after the ruling came down.
Any additional delays may be fatal for some of the offshore wind projects affected by Trump’s stop work orders, irrespective of the rulings in an appeal. Both Equinor and Orsted, developer of the Revolution Wind project, argued for their preliminary injunctions because even days of delay would potentially jeopardize access to vessels necessary for construction. Equinor even told the court that if the stop work order wasn’t lifted by Friday — that is, January 16 — it would cancel Empire Wind. Though Equinor won today, it is nowhere near out of the woods.
More court action is coming: Dominion will present arguments on Friday in federal court against the stop work order halting construction of its Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
A federal court has once again allowed Orsted to resume construction on its offshore wind project.
A federal court struck down the Trump administration’s three-month stop work order on Orsted’s Revolution offshore wind farm, once again allowing construction to resume (for the second time).
Explaining his ruling from the bench Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said that project developer Orsted — and the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, which filed their own suit in support of the company — were “likely” to win on the merits of their lawsuit that the stop work order violated the Administrative Procedures Act. Lamberth said that the Trump administration’s stop work order, issued just before Christmas, amounted to a change in administration position without adequate justification. The justice said he was not sure the emergency being described by the government exists, and that the “stated national security reason may have been pretextual.”
This case was life or death for Revolution Wind. If the stop work order had not been enjoined, Orsted told the court it may not have been able to secure proper vessels for at-sea construction for long enough to complete the project on schedule. This would have a domino effect, threatening Orsted’s ability to meet deadlines in signed power agreements with Rhode Island and Connecticut and therefore threatening wholesale cancellation of the project.
Undergirding this ruling was a quandary Orsted pointed out to the justice: The government issued the stop work order claiming it was intended to mitigate national security concerns but refused to share specifics of the basis for the stop work order with the developer. At the Monday hearing on the injunction in Washington, D.C., Revolution Wind’s legal team pointed to a key quote in a filing submitted by the Justice Department from Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary Jacob Tyner, saying that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the federal offshore energy regulator, was “not aware” of whether the national security risks could ever be mitigated, “and, if they can, whether the developers would find the proposed mitigation measures acceptable.”
This was the first positive outcome in what are multiple legal battles against the Christmas stop work orders against offshore wind projects. As I reported last week, two other developers filed individual suits alongside Orsted against their respective pauses: Dominion Energy in support of the Coastal Virginia offshore project, and Equinor over Empire Wind.
I expect what happened in the Revolution Wind case to be the beginning of a trend, as a cursory examination of the filings in those cases indicate similar contradictions to those that led to Revolution winning out. We’ll find out soon: The hearing on Empire’s stop work order is scheduled for Wednesday and Coastal Virginia on Friday.
