Offshore wind got the courtroom equivalent of a high-seas rescue Monday, when a federal judge allowed construction to continue at a massive project off the New England coast.
Revolution Wind was at growing risk of cancellation after the Interior Department halted work on the $6.2 billion project in August. The fight over the 65-turbine development has come to symbolize President Donald Trump’s attack on the wind industry. Industry representatives worried four other projects under the East Coast could also be shut down.
But those fears were eased, at least temporarily, after Judge Royce Lamberth issued a temporary injunction that allows work on Revolution Wind to resume. The ruling came in a lawsuit that Revolution Wind filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging Interior’s stop-work order.
Interior had cited unspecified national security concerns in its decision. But Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, called the stoppage “the height of arbitrary and capricious action” and said the government had not shown why Revolution Wind was out of compliance with its permit.
“It keeps offshore wind going while the case is pending,” said Francis Pullaro, president of RENEW Northeast, an association of clean energy developers and environmental groups. “It was an important decision for the health and future of offshore wind.”
The decision was particularly welcome in New England, where offshore wind is a centerpiece of a regional strategy to build new power generation and cut planet-warming pollution. Revolution Wind, a joint venture of Ørsted and a BlackRock subsidiary, is a 704-megawatt project capable of generating enough electricity to power 350,000 homes.
The project signed contracts to sell its power to Connecticut and Rhode Island during Trump’s first term in office. The governors of both states hailed Monday’s ruling, saying it would put laborers back to work while ensuring new electricity supplies will be brought online.
“Today’s court decision on Revolution Wind reaffirms what I’ve been saying from day one: Halting a fully permitted project that is already 80% complete harms Rhode Island families, businesses, and workers,” Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, said in a statement.
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, struck a more conciliatory tone, hailing the resumption of construction while pledging to work with the Trump administration to support other technologies like nuclear, hydropower and natural gas.
“We will continue to engage with the federal government on a durable path forward for this project and on shared energy priorities,” he said.
What Trump will do next is unclear. The Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether the department plans to appeal the decision.
Instead, Interior spokesperson Elizabeth Peace said Revolution Wind will be allowed to resume construction while the department reviews the project’s impact on national security and other industries, like commercial fishing.
“The Department of the Interior remains committed to ensuring that prior decisions are legally and factually sound,” Peace wrote in a statement.
Casey Hammond, who served at Interior during Trump’s first term, said Revolution Wind is taking a risk in suing the very agency that oversees it.
“At the end of the day you want a working relationship. That relationship doesn’t go away once the project is operating. There is still oversight responsibility,” Hammond said. “Of the two entities, Interior is the one that is going to be here down the road.”
‘Getting the job done’
Signs that work would soon resume on Revolution Wind were already beginning to emerge Monday.
Union leaders said they had been alerted over the weekend to have their members ready to return to work. Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, said union leaders in his state were meeting Monday when Lamberth’s decision came down. As the meeting broke up, business managers were already calling rank and file members about returning to work, he said.
“If the industry continues to partner with organized labor, then we have a path to victory and we need to follow that path,” Crowley said. “These projects are about redesigning our entire economy with labor unions leading the way toward decarbonizing.”
Revolution Wind was 80 percent complete at the time Interior issued the work stoppage. Interior said little about its reasoning at first, citing only national security concerns and prevention of other uses of the outer continental shelf.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum later said in a media interview that the government was worried about the potential for an undersea drone attack. In a filing in advance of Monday’s hearing, Interior said the project was out of compliance with its permit because it had not reached a final agreement with the Department of Defense on its use of fiber-optic sensors to monitor its transmission cable and electromagnetic emissions related to survey activity.
Revolution Wind, in court filings, presented evidence that it had preliminary agreements with DOD and that local military officials had given it the sign off to proceed.
But the impact of the work stoppage was piling up. The project said it was losing $2.3 million a day or more than $16 million a week.
An even bigger threat loomed in the form of a ticking clock. There is a global shortage of specialized vessels capable of building offshore wind projects. The ones contracted to Revolution Wind need to complete the job by year’s end before moving onto other projects, the project’s lawyers told the court. The chance of worsening weather as winter approaches only exacerbates those concerns, they said.
Now, the project faces a race to install the remaining 20 turbines and its second offshore substation, which was loaded aboard the deck of a heavy transport vessel when Interior issued its order in August.
“All focus is now on getting the job done,” said Kristian Ascanius Jacobsen, managing director of Green Ducklings, an offshore wind consulting firm in Denmark. Monday’s ruling marks a victory for the project, but political risks still linger, he said.
“The administration is out to stop development of these critical infrastructure projects however they can,” Jacobsen said.
