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VIRGINIA: Pause on Virginia offshore wind farm cost Dominion more than $200M — but turbines will power up soon

February 25, 2026 — The Trump administration’s attempt to stop Dominion Energy from building its wind farm off the Virginia Beach coast cost the utility $228 million, company executives told shareholders this week.

Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. Interior Department issued a stop-work order for the project and four others along the East Coast. Government officials claimed the wind farms would harm national security, but declined to provide more details.

Dominion sued and last month, a federal judge in Norfolk ruled in favor of the company, saying the administration did not sufficiently explain purported security threats. The case is still pending, but Dominion was allowed to restart construction.

During the nearly month-long stoppage, Dominion racked up expenses from equipment storage, contractual penalties, an idle workforce and delays in using time-sensitive vessels.

Read the full article at WMRA

Feds appeal ruling that voided Trump’s Day One anti-wind memo

February 19, 2026 — The Trump administration has appealed a December ruling that struck down a presidential memorandum barring offshore wind leasing and permitting.

Judge Patti B. Saris had declared the wind memo, issued by President Donald Trump on his first day back in office, unlawful. But on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice of appeal.

It comes one week after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the administration would “absolutely” appeal other court rulings issued in January and February that lifted the federal suspension orders on five under-construction offshore wind projects, including Vineyard Wind.

Those suspensions were issued shortly after Saris’ ruling on the wind memo. At this time, the federal government has not appealed those project-specific lawsuits.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

Legal tug-of-war over wind energy in Mass. continues with Trump admin challenge

February 19, 2026 — Lawyers for the Trump administration are challenging — in a Massachusetts court — a federal judge’s December ruling that struck down a freeze on all permitting for wind energy projects nationwide.

Issued in January 2025, the original presidential order temporarily halted all federal permitting while agencies reviewed wind energy leasing and permitting practices, according to court documents.

The December ruling overturning the order came after a coalition of 17 states — including Massachusetts — successfully argued that the administration’s permit pause violated federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Patti Saris ruled that the policy was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Read the full article at the Cape Cod Times

How EPA challenged Maryland offshore wind project

February 18, 2026 — EPA officials paid close attention to offshore wind opponents before the Trump administration questioned a state-issued permit for a planned Maryland offshore wind farm last summer, federal documents show.

The records, released by EPA following a public records request from POLITICO’s E&E News, outline how employees in the agency’s mid-Atlantic region met with national officials and rushed to respond to concerns from Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris, a prominent opponent of offshore wind.

The Maryland Offshore Wind Project has been in the spotlight since it slipped through the Trump administration’s blockade of offshore wind permits. State regulators issued the developer a final permit in June, leading the Interior Department to say in August that it planned to revoke the project’s federal permit.

Read the full article at E&E News

More Republicans buck Trump on offshore wind

February 12, 2026 —  A growing number of House Republicans are openly questioning the Trump administration’s assertion that offshore wind projects pose a risk to national security.

Nine Republicans, led by House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino of New York, last month called on top Trump officials to brief lawmakers about their decision in December to halt construction of five nearly complete projects off the Atlantic coast.

Judges have ruled against the administration’s pause in all five cases, but many lawmakers see the stop-work orders as part of a concerted and ongoing attack on offshore wind and other renewable energy ventures.

Read the full article at E&E News

MASSACHUSETTS: State AG pushing back on effort to halt development of offshore wind

February 11, 2026 — Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell has filed an amicus brief opposing the Trump Administration’s effort to halt development of the New England Wind 1 offshore wind project, which is expected to power more than 300,000 homes.

Supporting developer Avangrid Power, Campbell argued that completing the project is essential to meeting growing energy demand, especially during winter with rising heating bills.

Read the full article at CapeCod.com

MARYLAND: Maryland’s offshore wind project faces legal pushback from Ocean City, Trump administration

February 6, 2026 —  Attracting 8 million annual visitors to its popular beach and bustling boardwalk, Ocean City, Maryland, is a cornerstone of the state’s culture and economy — but the view from the beach will change if the state government has its way.

Instead of looking out at just the sky and waves, visitors could one day see tiny toothpick-like structures — windmills, actually — on the horizon. That prospect has prompted a fierce political battle over an ambitious, 114-turbine wind energy project that aims to generate renewable power for over 700,000 homes.

Offshore wind developer US Wind leased the federal waters after winning a 2014 auction. The U.S. Department of the Interior approved the company’s construction and operations plan in December 2024, greenlighting the Momentum Wind project, which could generate over 2,000 megawatts of clean energy in addition to the MarWin turbines.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has defended the project as a key way to increase the local energy supply in a state that historically imports about 40% of its electricity.

“Maryland is serious about offshore wind — not just because of what it means for our environment but also because of what it means for our economy,” Moore said last year.

Yet while the state attempts to implement offshore wind capable of paving the way for a clean energy future, opponents on two fronts have fought to stop the project.

The founder of the Stop Offshore Wind campaign – Kevin Gibbs, owner of the Dough Roller restaurants in Ocean City– contends the presence of the windmills will hurt tourism and fishing in the region.

“You’re going to have an economic impact on families that have been here for generations,” he said.

In addition to local pushback from community members like Gibbs, President Donald Trump issued an executive order during his first month in office withdrawing leases for offshore wind projects. A federal judge overturned that order in December, but US Wind has paused design work on the project as it awaits the resolution of a separate federal court case in which Gibbs’ group and the Trump administration argue the federal permit for the project should be withdrawn.

“No law would impose civil or criminal liability on US Wind if it continued to develop the project,” U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher wrote in a recent decision in the case. “It simply has made a business decision not to do so in light of the political headwinds it perceives.”

Read the full article at Capital News Service 

VIRGINIA: First production turbine installed at Virginia offshore wind farm

February 4, 2026 — The first production wind turbine for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project was installed Jan. 27, less than two weeks after developer Dominion Energy won a temporary injunction against the Trump administration’s stop-work order.

Dominion’s 472’x184’ wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV) Charybdis, built at Seatrium’s AmFELS shipyard in Brownsville, Texas, is the first Jones Act-compliant WTIV under the U.S. flag. After the project is about 71% completed and is expected to be sending power to the regional grid in the first quarter of 2026, according to Dominion.

In a Jan. 30 update Dominion reported that all 176 monopiles have been installed on the lease for the 2.6-gigawatt rated project, along with as 119 transition and 57 awaiting installation.

Read the full article at WorkBoat

Yet another judge rejects Trump effort to block offshore wind, saying NY project can resume

February 3, 2026 — A federal judge on Monday ruled that an offshore wind project aimed at powering 600,000 New York homes can resume construction, the fifth such project put back on track after the Trump administration halted them in December.

In clearing the way for Sunrise Wind to proceed, Judge Royce Lamberth found that the government had not shown that offshore wind is such an imminent national security risk that it must halt in the United States.

President Donald Trump has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built, and often talks about his hatred of wind power. His administration froze five big offshore wind projects on the East Coast days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued to block the order. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers has repeatedly said during the legal battle over the pause that Trump has been clear that “wind energy is the scam of the century” and the pause is meant to protect the national security of the American people.

Read the full article at The Associated Press

Judge Hands Trump a Fifth Loss in His Effort to Halt Offshore Wind Projects

February 3, 2026 — A federal judge on Monday struck down the Interior Department’s order to halt work on a multibillion-dollar wind farm off the coast of New York State, the fifth time the courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to throttle the country’s offshore wind industry. The administration is now 0-5 in its effort to stop wind farms under construction along the East Coast.

Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction that would allow the developer of the New York project, known as Sunrise Wind, to restart construction while the broader legal battle unfolds.

In December, the Interior Department ordered all work to halt on Sunrise Wind and four other wind farms off the East Coast. To justify the sweeping move, officials cited a classified report by the Defense Department that they said found the projects to be a national security threat.

But Judge Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he was unpersuaded by the government’s claims about national security after reviewing the classified report under seal. He said the actions of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had caused “irreparable harm” to the developer of Sunrise Wind.

Read the full article at The New York Times