The Trump administration escalated its offensive against offshore wind Monday by slamming its costs and effectiveness — but also by ramping up concerns about national security.
The Interior Department said it was suspending leases for five projects currently under construction off the East Coast because of recent classified reports from the Defense Department.
In a statement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the move addressed “emerging national security risks.” He pointed to a “rapid evolution” of adversaries’ technologies and concerns about radar “clutter.”
National security analysts were skeptical about what new security information might have come to light about offshore wind. The five projects under construction were approved during the Biden administration in consultation with military officials, and several U.S. allies in Europe have large offshore wind projects. Legal experts also questioned whether the pause will withstand legal scrutiny.
It “boggles the mind” that “all of a sudden the secretary of Interior learned something that everybody missed over the last 15 years,” said Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel and wind energy consultant.
He said wind developers generally agree to pay for a radar software upgrade to edit out turbine interference once a project is operational, while also agreeing to shut down a project’s operations if military officials believe a threat in the vicinity needs to be investigated further.
From 2010 to 2012, Belote directed the Defense Department’s siting clearinghouse that aimed to ensure renewable energy projects were compatible with military operations.
Monday’s move from the Trump administration affects five projects: Vineyard Wind 1 and Revolution Wind off the coast of New England; Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1 off New York; and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. As of September, half of Vineyard Wind 1 was operational.
Interior said it would work with the developers to determine whether the identified problems could be mitigated.
The Department of Defense, which President Donald Trump previously renamed the Department of War, did not respond to a request for comment about the pause. An Interior spokesperson declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement.
“The Department of War has come back conclusively that the issues related to these large offshore wind programs create radar interference that creates a genuine risk for the U.S., particularly related to where they are in proximity to our East Coast population centers,” Burgum told Fox Business on Monday morning.
Throughout the day, Burgum also released a series of posts on social media slamming the costs of offshore wind energy.
Wind advocates — including Democratic members of Congress — pushed back against the administration’s claims that wind energy is too expensive and unreliable. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) called the move “stupid and shortsighted.”
“Clutter” or “interference” occurs when unwanted reflections or indicators appear on radar systems, obscuring objects that operators are looking to identify.
While wind turbines have long been known to affect radar systems, national security experts said those impacts can be mitigated by additional operator training or other types of surveillance technology.
Lasse Hirsch, who served in the Royal Danish Navy and now is a partner at a consulting firm focused on offshore energy infrastructure and national security called Heimdal Critical Infrastructure, said radar issues are real but “manageable.” He said it was “too easy” for the administration to raise national security concerns without specifying them.
“It’s like giving me a fine on the motorway without telling me how I have been speeding,” he said.
Looking to mitigate
In a statement, the Danish energy giant Ørsted, which is developing Sunrise Wind and Revolution Wind with Skyborn Renewables, said it was “evaluating all options to resolve the matter expeditiously,” including through engaging with federal agencies “as well as the evaluation of potential legal proceedings.” The company said federal officials on Monday instructed the developer to halt activities on its leases for the next 90 days.
Equinor, the Norwegian developer of Empire Wind 1, said in a statement Monday that the company is “engaging with relevant authorities to better understand this matter.”
“Empire plans to continue to work with BOEM and other federal agencies to continue to implement all necessary mitigation for the project,” the statement said.
A spokesperson for Vineyard Wind did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Monday was not the first time the Trump administration has raised national security concerns about offshore wind. In an interview with CNN in August, Burgum said the administration was worried about a “swarm drone attack” through an offshore wind farm.
Tue Lippert, who is also a partner at Heimdal Critical Infrastructure who served in the Royal Danish Navy, said he thought a drone attack would be more likely to be detected if it happened near a wind project site, where there would be workers and ships present. Installing other surveillance measures could make wind projects into a security asset, he said.
“An attacker will always choose the weakest spot, and trust me a wind farm is not that,” Lippert said.
Interior’s announcement cited a 2024 report from the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation Working Group, which said that wind farms could cause radar operators to “miss actual targets.”
The working group included officials from the Defense Department; Federal Aviation Administration; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an Interior agency that helps oversee offshore energy leasing.
The Biden-era report also found that wind energy would play a “leading role” in a national transition to cleaner energy and said that interagency collaboration on mitigation “must continue in order to define solutions that will allow large-scale wind deployment.”
Legally vulnerable
Legal analysts, advocacy groups and Democratic lawmakers emphasized that each of the projects had already undergone years of rigorous analysis, and they questioned whether the administration’s latest move to freeze the leases was likely to withstand legal scrutiny.
They pointed to recent federal district court rulings that have struck down the administration’s earlier efforts to halt offshore wind projects as evidence these latest stop-work orders could also fail.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, called the order “even more lawless and erratic” than a stop-work order for Revolution Wind that was struck down by a federal court in September.
“We are evaluating all legal options, and this will be stopped just like last time,” Tong said in a statement.
The state attorney general had backed Revolution Wind in the case before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, found that Interior failed to provide evidence that the developers of Revolution Wind did not comply with their federal permit. The judge described the order as “the height of arbitrary and capricious.”
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, both Democrats, pointed to a ruling this month by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which found that Interior failed to explain its rationale for an order earlier this year that blocked all new approvals for onshore and offshore wind projects.
Interior had only pointed to Trump’s January executive order halting new wind approvals.
The Trump administration is widely expected to appeal the ruling. Interior declined to comment.
“Earlier this month, the courts rightly threw out Trump’s unlawful executive order and agency actions that attempted to ban offshore wind, so today’s groundless blind-side against the industry should not be allowed to stand,” the Massachusetts senators said in a joint statement.
They also demanded to see the classified reports the Trump administration was relying on to “justify this bizarre attack on our grid.”
The White House declined to comment.
