A federal judge has allowed an offshore wind project off of New York to resume construction, a major reprieve for the multibillion-dollar project that was on the brink of abandoning work after receiving a stop-work order from the Trump administration last month.
Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday granted a request from the developers of Empire Wind 1 for a preliminary injunction that will allow construction to continue while litigation over Trump’s order moves forward. Nichols said the developers had sufficiently demonstrated that their project faced potential irreparable harm from the construction pause and shown a likelihood that they would eventually prevail in their lawsuit.
The judge said the Trump administration’s lawyers had failed to respond in court filings to several of the project developer’s arguments, and noted that the government’s national security concerns about Empire Wind were not enough to outweigh the harm to the project. At a hearing Wednesday morning, Nichols sharply questioned a Justice Department attorney over the government’s legal briefs.
Officials at Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant building the project, have said in court filings that last month’s stop-work order could spell the end for the wind farm if it cannot resume work by Friday. The project is 60 percent complete, and Equinor has so far spent more than $4 billion on it.
