Saving Seafood

The Feds Had Questions. Court Filings Claim Revolution Wind Developers Didn’t Answer Them

September 17, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s opposition to offshore wind crystallized long before he won re-election. But the justification for the administration’s abrupt halt to the Revolution Wind project on Aug. 22 has remained murky.

Until now.

New court filings from the U.S. Department of Justice reveal the rationale behind the U.S. Department of Interior’s (DOI) decision to shut down the 65-turbine project that was already 80% finished: Developers allegedly failed to turn in required plans on how the project off Rhode Island’s coastline would affect national ocean research and defense work.

“As of the date of this Declaration, still DOI not received any information that these requirements have been satisfied and given how long they remain pending, the department has concerns as to whether they will ever be met,” Adam Suess, acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management for the Interior Department, wrote in a Sept. 12 affidavit.

Suess’ written testimony counters the criticism from state officials and project developers accusing the Trump administration of arbitrary and unlawful abuses of power in a pair of federal lawsuits filed Sept. 4.

Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables, co-developers of the $5 billion wind project, filed their lawsuit against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other federal agencies and directors in D.C., while attorneys general in Rhode Island and Connecticut took their legal challenge to Rhode Island federal court. The two southern New England states were under contracts to buy electricity from the 704-megawatt project starting next year. Now in limbo, thousands of labor jobs are on the line, along with both states’ abilities to meet their climate change mandates and the reliability of the regional electric grid.

Read the full article at Rhode Island PBS

Trump admin tries to sink Maryland’s first offshore wind project

September 17, 2025 — Maryland’s first offshore wind farm could have broken ground next year. But now the 114-turbine renewable energy project is all but doomed following the Trump administration’s most recent move in a long line of attacks on the industry.

In a motion filed Friday with the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Interior Department asked a judge to cancel approval of the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which was authorized in the final weeks of the Biden administration. The wind farm was expected to power over 718,000 homes in a Democrat-led state facing rocketing energy demands.

Officials claim that the agency’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management made an ​“error” when assessing the turbines’ potential impact on other activities — like search-and-rescue operations and fishing — within the 80,000-acre swath of ocean where the wind farm would be located.

The project is over a decade in the making, with developer US Wind purchasing the lease in 2014. But after President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July and greatly shortened the duration of the wind energy tax credit, Maryland’s first offshore wind farm already seemed impossible to pull off — at least economically.

Harrison Sholler, an offshore wind analyst with BloombergNEF, told Canary Media in July that with the tax credits sunsetting at a much earlier date, the Maryland project would likely no longer be able to offset 30% of its costs. The original rule for receiving the incentives required construction to start by 2033 or potentially even later, but the new law stipulates that wind farms must be ​“placed in service” by the end of 2027 or begin construction by July 4, 2026, to qualify.

Read the full article at Canary Media

NEW YORK: East Hampton To Use Offshore Wind Fund to Offset Federal Shortfalls for Montauk Inlet Dredging

September 16, 2025 — East Hampton’s windfall from the South Fork Wind Farm is being used by the town to commence a much-needed federal dredging of the inlet to Lake Montauk, the biggest commercial fishing port in New York State.

According to East Hampton Town, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ bids to perform the long-planned Lake Montauk Harbor Navigation Improvement Project this fall came in $1.1 million higher than expected, and the agency informed the town it would need $1.1 million by Sept. 10 in order to go forward with the dredging, which can only be done between Oct. 15 and Jan. 15.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez announced Monday that the town has allocated $1.1 million from its Host Community Agreement, which in 2022 allowed South Fork Wind to place its transmission cables from its offshore wind farm under town roads in exchange for $28.9 million over the following 25 years.

The money, she said in a statement, would “fill a federal funding gap and ensure the dredging of Montauk Inlet moves forward, after Washington fell short on delivering the full commitment.”

Read the full article at East End Beacon

US asks federal court to cancel permit for Maryland offshore wind farm

September 15, 2025 —  The Trump administration asked a federal judge to cancel the 2024 approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, saying former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration had underestimated threats it would cause to search and rescue operations and commercial fisheries, according to court documents filed on Friday.

If approved by the court, the motion would invalidate a years-long federal process that permitted US Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project. The facility was expected to generate enough electricity to power 718,000 homes at a time of soaring U.S. demand.

Read the full article at Reuters

Feds cast cloud over SouthCoast Wind project

September 12, 2025 — The future is uncertain for SouthCoast Wind, a planned wind farm south of the islands that would serve Rhode Island and Massachusetts via power cables routed under the Sakonnet River to Brayton Point in Fall River.

Earlier this month, officials from the United States Department of the Interior issued a filing in a Washington, DC court noting that agency officials intend “to reconsider” approval of the project. The news comes just weeks after the Trump Administration ordered work halted on Revolution Wind, another farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was 80 percent built out when work was ordered to stop.

The Sept. 2 filing was associated with a civil suit brought by Nantucket against Southcoast Wind, the federal Department of the Interior and the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). Filings also note that Interior officials seek a “voluntary remand” of previous federal approvals by this coming Thursday, Sept. 18.

Southcoast Wind, a 2.4-gigawatt farm that company officials said would power more than 800,000 homes in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, is currently under review by the BOEM following the Biden administration’s approval late last year of 127,000-acre ocean lease area about 30 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and 23 miles south of Nantucket.

The plan has always been to connect electric cables from the site through federal and state waters, including the Sakonnet River, and eventually to an electrical substation at Brayton Point in Somerset, where it would link to the regional electric grid.

Read the full article at East Bay RI

Orsted Sues Over Stop-Work Order

September 12, 2025 — Revolution Wind, a wind farm under construction in federal waters on the outer continental shelf, has sued the Trump administration following the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s August issuance of a stop-work order, with the 65-turbine installation already 80-percent complete.

The stop-work order was one of multiple actions apparently aimed at killing a nascent domestic offshore wind industry. In July, the federal Interior Department announced the end of what it called “preferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy,” and in August launched investigations into bird deaths caused by wind farms. BOEM rescinded regulations outlining renewable energy lease sales early last month.

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

Could Revolution Wind get back to work? Burgum comments suggest anything is possible.

September 11, 2025 — A week after Gov. Dan McKee asked to meet with President Donald Trump over the administration’s halt to the Revolution Wind project, he’s still waiting for an answer.

But U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is suggesting the paused project might not be dead in the water after all. In an interview on CNBC Wednesday, Burgum, whose office oversees federal permits for offshore wind projects, indicated the administration was open to letting work resume on the 65-turbine project.

Read the full article at Yahoo News!

VIRGINIA: The Lone G.O.P. Governor Opposing Trump’s War on Offshore Wind

September 10, 2025 — President Trump has sought to halt the construction of five giant wind farms off the coasts of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island — all states run by Democrats.

But there is one East Coast wind farm that has so far escaped the administration’s ire: a $10.8 billion project under construction off the shores of Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has been its champion.

Mr. Youngkin has quietly pushed back against Mr. Trump’s war on wind energy. A supporter of the president, the governor has privately urged the Trump administration not to target the project known as Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, according to four people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Mr. Youngkin called Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, last month to voice support for the project, according to two of the people briefed on the matter. His office also called the White House in January to express concern about Mr. Trump’s executive order that paused permits for new wind farms on federal lands and waters, two of the individuals said.

Read the full article at The New York Times

How New England is handling Trump’s offshore wind assault

September 10, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s war on offshore wind power is clobbering New England, and officials there are warning of future grid reliability problems. In this new energy reality, though, many states in the region say they will try their best to muddle through.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has stunned states and industry alike with a whirlwind of actions, highlighted by halting a nearly complete project off Rhode Island’s coast — Revolution Wind — and seeking to revoke a permit for a Massachusetts project. Other crucial projects in the region have been caught up in a temporary pause on leases.

In a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump reiterated his hatred of wind. “We’re not allowing any windmills to go up,” he said. “They’re ruining our country.”

Read the full article at E&E News