September 4, 2025 — After a dozen days in limbo, state and federal officials keep ramping up the pressure on the Trump administration to let the Revolution Wind project resume. The offshore wind project already under construction south of Rhode Island was put on hold on Aug. 22, leaving workers in the lurch and risking critical energy reliability and climate change mandates.
In a Wednesday letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Gov. Dan McKee outlined the consequences of the stop-work order, while asking for a meeting with President Donald Trump.
“The stop-work order undermines efforts to expand our energy supply, lower costs for families and businesses, and strengthen regional reliability,” McKee wrote to Burgum. “This action puts hundreds of well-paid blue-collar jobs at risk by halting a project that is just steps away from powering more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut.”
More than 1,000 union workers have spent much of the last two years building the 65-turbine project, 45 of which have been installed, as well as a pair of substations that will connect the power supply to Rhode Island and Connecticut. The 704 megawatts of nameplate capacity was set to be delivered by mid-2026, and already baked into the long-term plans for meeting Rhode Island’s decarbonization mandates under the state’s 2021 Act on Climate law. It is also critical to regional electrical grid reliability, especially in extreme weather events where fuel supply might be limited.