Saving Seafood

US plans to revoke approval of another Massachusetts offshore wind farm

September 4, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s administration plans to revoke federal approval of Avangrid’s planned New England Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, according to a court filing on Wednesday.

The legal maneuver is the latest move by U.S. authorities to stymie development of offshore wind energy, which Trump has called ugly, expensive, and unreliable. Last week, the administration also said it was reconsidering approval of SouthCoast Wind, another planned Massachusetts project.

In recent weeks, Trump has deployed a range of tactics to stop offshore wind expansion, which was a cornerstone of former President Joe Biden’s efforts to combat climate change but has struggled with soaring costs and supply chain snags. Most notably, Trump’s Interior Department late last month issued a stop-work order on the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, which is 80% complete.

In Wednesday’s court filing, attorneys for the Department of Justice said they would move by October 10 to vacate the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval of the New England Wind construction and operations plan.

Read the full article at Reuters

White House Orders Agencies to Escalate Fight Against Offshore Wind

September 4, 2025 — The White House has taken the extraordinary step of instructing a half-dozen agencies to draft plans to thwart the country’s offshore wind industry as it intensifies its governmentwide attack on a source of renewable energy that President Trump has criticized as ugly, expensive and inefficient.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser, are leading the effort, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Agencies that typically have little to do with offshore wind power have been drawn into the effort, the two people said. At the Health and Human Services Department, for instance, officials are studying whether wind turbines are emitting electromagnetic fields that could harm human health. And the Defense Department is probing whether the projects could pose risks to national security.

Last week Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, said he was working with Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, as part of a “departmental coalition team” to investigate the risks from offshore wind farms.

Read the full article at The New York Times

NOAA gathering input on restoring U.S. seafood competitiveness

September 4, 2025 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) is gathering input from the public on the White House executive order entitled “Restoring America’s Seafood Competitiveness.”

The association is inviting feedback from fishing industry members, technology experts, marine scientists, other relevant parties, and members of the public on priority needs such as fishery-related barriers, fisheries management, and science, NOAA said in a public statement.

The executive order, which was published in April 2025, said, “Seafood is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the United States. Federal overregulation has restricted fishermen from productively harvesting [U.S.] seafood, including through restrictive catch limits, selling our fishing grounds to foreign offshore wind companies, inaccurate and outdated fisheries data, and delayed adoption of modern technology.”

Read the full article at Aquaculture North America

Feds target fully permitted New England Wind project

September 4, 2025 —  The Trump administration ratcheted up its targeting of the offshore wind industry on Wednesday, stating its intent to revoke a key approval for the fully permitted New England Wind 1 project, which plans to use New Bedford for long-term operations.

In the document, filed as part of a lawsuit brought by ACK for Whales against the Avangrid project, the federal government said it is “intending to move no later than October 10 to remand and, separately, to vacate” the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval of the construction and operations plan, a permit granted to the project in mid-2024.

Without the permit, the project cannot be built. Separately, the project has been in the process of securing a power purchase agreement with the state, another necessity for project buildout. The agreement has been delayed several times due to the Trump administration’s freeze on offshore wind permitting and the uncertainty it has created.

New England Wind 1 plans to construct the project out of Salem (a terminal yet to be built that last week lost $34 million in federal funding), but house its long-term operations and maintenance hub in New Bedford. Contingent on the project moving forward, the Danish company, Liftra, also plans to establish a crane manufacturing facility in the city.

New England Wind 1’s lease area is located south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The project’s first phase plans to install up to 800 megawatts of energy.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

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

VIRGINIA: Trump admin cancels $39M meant for Norfolk’s Fairwinds Landing because of wind energy association

September 4, 2025 — Norfolk’s Economic Development Authority will ask the Trump administration to reconsider its decision to cancel a grant meant to improve Fairwinds Landing.

The body made the decision during their monthly meeting Wednesday, five days after the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the $39 million in Port Infrastructure Development Program (PIDP) funding would be withdrawn, due to the sites association with the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project.

The funding, first awarded to the authority in 2023 under the Biden administration, was to “assist in transforming the marine terminal at Fairwinds Landing into offshore wind logistics facility,”

Read the full article at WAVY

Trump administration to reconsider SouthCoast Wind permit, legal filing says

September 3, 2025 —  The Trump administration will reconsider the permit for SouthCoast Wind, a Massachusetts offshore wind farm approved by the government of former U.S. President Joe Biden last year, according to a federal court filing seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

In a motion filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, attorneys for the Department of Justice said the Interior Department intended to reconsider the approval of SouthCoast Wind’s construction and operations plan.

The legal maneuver is the latest move by President Donald Trump’s administration to stymie development of offshore wind energy, which he says is ugly, expensive and unreliable.

Read the full article at Reuters

Trump’s war on offshore wind: Tracking the actions and impacts

September 3, 2025 — President Donald Trump’s fight against offshore wind has escalated this summer, with more than one dozen agency actions in the last two months alone — the latest of which has stopped a project in its tracks.

The Trump administration has significantly truncated the window to receive multimillion dollar tax credits. It’s issued new Treasury guidance that redefines what it means to start project construction (in order to access those credits). It has imposed 50% tariffs on wind turbine imports. And it has mandated reviews of offshore wind projects by several agencies, including the Justice Department.

Some of the impacts have been quick and clear, illustrated through LinkedIn layoff posts, the return of ships to port (temporarily barred from undertaking the contracted work), project delays, and union laborers protesting the loss of work that they trained for.

Since Trump ordered a freeze on all offshore wind projects permitting on his first day in office, the industry has remained largely silent, deferring to states, lobbyists and organizations to come to its defense. Several of these state allies will return to federal court in Boston on Thursday, where they’ll argue that the permitting freeze is illegal and must be lifted.

“I would say my biggest concern and one that has borne out is this really unfortunate and deep shake to market confidence of the sector writ large,” said Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative for Offshore Wind, on the administration’s treatment of the industry. “From the offshore wind developers down through the supply chain are more and more skeptical with each of these actions that the U.S. is a place for them to do business.”

Bill White, an offshore wind industry veteran, didn’t mince words: The industry is in “dire straits” because of the uncertainty created by the administration.

Read the full article at The New Bedford Light

VIRGINIA: Trump administration withdraws $39.27M for Norfolk offshore wind project

September 3, 2025 — The Trump administration last week withdrew $39.27 million in federal funding that had previously been awarded for an offshore wind logistics port in Norfolk and attempted to terminate $20 million for a project that had already been completed in Portsmouth.

The Norfolk Offshore Wind Logistics Port, part of the 111-acre Fairwinds Landing project at Lambert’s Point Docks, is the project losing nearly $40 million that was awarded in 2023 under the Biden administration.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Aug. 29 that Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy withdrew or terminated a total of $679 million in funding for 12 offshore wind projects across the country. The department stated that the action is intended to “ensure federal dollars are prioritized towards restoring America’s maritime dominance and preventing waste.”

The department stated that it identified 12 projects that were not aligned with the current administration’s priorities. The Trump administration has repeatedly criticized and targeted  projects, instead prioritizing fossil fuels and “traditional forms of energy.”

“Wasteful, wind projects are using resources that could otherwise go towards revitalizing America’s maritime industry,” said Duffy in a statement. “Joe Biden and [former Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg bent over backwards to use transportation dollars for their Green New Scam agenda while ignoring the dire needs of our shipbuilding industry. Thanks to President Trump, we are prioritizing real infrastructure improvements over fantasy wind projects that cost much and offer little.”

Read the full article at Virginia Business 

MASSACHUSETTS: Trump administration may be killing SouthCoast Wind. What does this mean for Somerset?

September 3, 2025 — The future looks dim for SouthCoast Wind, an offshore wind project that was due to make landfall at Brayton Point in Somerset.

According to court filings from the District of Columbia District Court, the federal Department of the Interior “intends to reconsider” approval of the SouthCoast Wind project.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved a massive lease area about 30 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard to SouthCoast Wind. The company has intended to connect that power in Somerset, building a substation at the Brayton Point Commerce Center.

Read the full article at the Cape Cod Times