Saving Seafood

Orsted’s Revolution Wind sues Trump administration over project halt

September 5, 2025 — Danish offshore wind developer Orsted (ORSTED.CO), and the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut sued the Trump administration on Thursday, alleging its decision to block construction of the nearly finished Revolution Wind project is illegal.

The separate complaints are the latest twist in a saga that started last month when U.S. officials issued a stop-work order to Revolution Wind, citing unspecified national security concerns. The order forced the suspension of a project that was 80% complete with all offshore foundations in place and 45 out of 65 wind turbines installed.

“The stop-work order was issued without statutory authority, lacks any evidentiary basis, and is unlawful,” Revolution Wind said in its complaint against U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and five other federal defendants. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized wind energy as ugly, unreliable, and expensive, and his administration is leaning on multiple federal agencies to rein in wind development.

Critics say Trump’s stance on offshore wind is at odds with his goal to boost energy supplies to power the nation’s ambitions around artificial intelligence, which requires a huge amount of data processing.

Read the full article at Reuters

Orsted Sues Trump Administration in Fight to Restart Its Blocked Wind Farm

September 5, 2025 — Orsted, the Danish renewable energy giant, sued the Trump administration on Thursday, saying the government’s move to halt a nearly finished wind farm off Rhode Island was unlawful and “issued in bad faith.”

The administration last month took the remarkable step of ordering work to stop on Revolution Wind, a $6.2 billion offshore wind farm that was nearly 80 percent complete, as part of a campaign to block wind projects. In a letter to Orsted, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management alluded to national security concerns with the project but did not elaborate.

On Thursday, Revolution Wind LLC, a joint venture between Orsted and Skyborn Renewables, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to prevent the administration from enforcing the stop-work order. The complaint alleges that the order was arbitrary and capricious in part because it appeared to be carried out under political pressure from the White House.

The attorneys general of Connecticut and Rhode Island also said that they would file a separate lawsuit Thursday in the United States District Court for Rhode Island to overturn the stop-work order.

Read the full article at The New York Times

RHODE ISLAND: R.I. Gov. McKee asks to meet with Trump over Revolution Wind project still in limbo

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.

Read the full article at the Rhode Island Current

Westport will wait and see following wind farm halt

September 2, 2025 — Westport officials are waiting and watching, but so far have heard no news on whether Vineyard Wind is next on a list of threatened projects following news late last week that work on Revolution Wind, a 65-turbine off the coast of Rhode Island that is 80 percent complete, has been halted by the Trump administration.

“Nothing yet,” Jake McGuigan, a select board member and chairman of the Offshore Wind Advisory Committee, said Monday.

The advisory committee has no regulatory authority but was formed last year to monitor the potential impacts of offshore wind on Westport. It was established after residents raised concerns that Vineyard Offshore had listed Westport as one of two possible landing sites for offshore cables from a wind farm it is proposing south of Nantucket. But in late February, company representatives appeared before the advisory committee and said there are no plans to route any cables through Westport, and they are instead focusing on New London, Ct. as a potential landing zone.

Since then, the board has reduced its meeting frequency to quarterly; McGuigan said the next will be held in October, and he suspects any potential regulatory news will be on the agenda.

Read the full article at East Bay RI

RHODE ISLAND: Are Rhode Island River Herring’s Problems Really Out at Sea?

August 28, 2025 — While Rhode Island has spent decades and millions of dollars erecting fish ladders, removing dams, and cleaning up its rivers to shore up dwindling herring populations, it’s a different case when the fish are in the ocean.

River herring, both the blueback and alewife species found in Rhode Island, are diadromous fish, meaning they spawn in freshwater but live their adult lives in the ocean.

Read the full article at ecoRI

RHODE ISLAND: ‘You are our only chance’: Why fishermen are applauding Trump’s halt of Revolution Wind

August 27, 2025 — While Gov. Dan McKee and state elected leaders have roundly criticized the Trump administration’s order to stop work on Revolution Wind, members of the Rhode Island fishing industry are applauding the decision to halt construction of the 65-turbine offshore wind farm.

A handful of industry representatives gathered Tuesday, Aug. 26 on the Galilee waterfront to thank the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for the stop-work order, and to urge the administration to take similar action against other offshore wind projects proposed or being built in Atlantic Ocean waters in the region.

“I have one thing to say to the U.S. government,” said Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison for North Kingstown-based seafood distributor Seafreeze. “Save our fishing grounds from offshore wind. All of them. You’ve started with Revolution Wind, and for that we are grateful. Now, go down the list because it’s long, and you are our only chance.”

Read the full article at The Newport Daily News

With Little Explanation, Trump Throws Wind Industry Into Chaos

August 26, 2025 — When the Trump administration ordered that construction stop last week at Revolution Wind, a giant wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that was nearly finished, it alluded vaguely to national security concerns but did not offer any further explanation.

It’s becoming a striking pattern.

The order was the third time the Trump administration had revoked permits or halted work on wind farms that had already received federal approval while offering little legal justification for doing so, following actions against wind projects in New York and Idaho. Legal experts say that there is little basis for blocking projects that have already received permits.

The Trump administration has signaled in a court filing that it next plans to rescind federal approvals for yet another wind farm, the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, which had not yet begun construction but would consist of up to 114 wind turbines off the coast of Ocean City, Md. The filing was first reported by WBOC.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Democratic governors demand Trump resume offshore wind project near Rhode Island

August 26, 2025 — A nearly complete wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut faces an uncertain future as the states’ Democratic governors, members of Congress and union workers are calling Monday for the Trump administration to let construction resume.

The administration halted construction on the Revolution Wind project last week, saying the federal government needs to review the project and address national security concerns. It did not specify what those concerns are. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Monday it’s not commenting further at this time.

Read the full article at PBS

CT officials, workers decry Trump administration’s halt to nearly completed offshore wind project

August 26, 2025 — Wind turbine pieces stood hundreds of feet tall above dozens of trade workers and Connecticut officials Monday, as they spoke out against the Trump administration’s sudden pause of Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm project. It was poised to soon provide electricity to at least 350,000 homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

“This is a project that our grid operator was counting on to turn on at the end of next year,” Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said from the State Pier in New London.

Read the full article at Maine Public

‘Offshore Wind Gets a Pass’ When It Comes to Environmental Concerns

August 19, 2025 —  In 2024, I penned an op-ed here at ecoRI News entitled Commonsense Environmentalism is Being Destroyed by a Wind-Less Revolution, opening with a statement that, “the Ocean State has become ground zero for the most important environmental battle in modern times.” Indeed, this battle persists — that is, whether to preserve and protect nature, versus to concede nature for the fantastical ideology of a greenwashed industrial panacea.

This rift was exposed through recent reporting that summarizes the outcome of a recent Energy Facility Siting Board (EFSB) meeting in Portsmouth, R.I. The meeting aimed to productively discuss the plans for South Coast Wind to run a power cable from 60 miles offshore extending up through the Sakonnet River, beneath Portsmouth, and then up through Mount Hope Bay to Brayton Point. The meeting was well attended, with equal numbers of public comments presented by both opponents and supporters of the project. Despite these equal voices, the ecoRI News article emphasized that those opposed were the minority opinion, even denigrating such opinions as parroted views of those under the thumb of fossil fuel lobbyists.

This is nothing further from the truth, and a significant disservice to those seeking balanced environmental reporting from which their own opinions may be formulated.

While it would take multiple volumes of literature to collate the plethora of very valid concerns for harms that both onshore and offshore industrial activities inflict, it is worth dispelling the mythology promulgated in the follow-up to the EFSB meeting. I will do so here through several exemplary issues that are very real and should resonate for all — regardless of your personal opinions on the windless revolution.

First, the ecoRI News reporting claimed South Coast Wind is “expected to generate 2,400 megawatts (MW) of electricity, powering around a million homes by the end of the decade.” On Jan. 17, 2025, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced approval of a Construction and Operations Plan with the potential to generate up to 2,400 megawatts of which could power 840,000 homes. These facts matter when separating marketing propaganda from reality. For visual perspective, the project is slated to span 127,388 acres of the continental shelf — more than 10 TIMES the land area of Providence. Would you advocate that an equivalent farmland area be mowed for a solar farm? Unlikely.

Read the full article at EcoRI