Work on a nearly-finished wind farm set to power some 350,000 homes this month in Connecticut and Rhode Island resumed this week after a judge granted another preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s latest attempt to cancel it.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Monday that the US Department of the Interior’s pre-Christmas suspension order against the Revolution Wind scheme had been “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of federal law, The New York Times reports.
On 22 December, the Interior Department suspended all five big wind schemes under construction off the eastern US coast, of which Revolution Wind is one.
It’s 87% complete and was expected to start generating electricity this month under power-purchase agreements with utilities in the two states.
All of its offshore foundations had been built and 58 of 65 wind turbines had been installed when the latest stop-work order came, said Danish company Ørsted, which is developing Revolution Wind in a 50/50 joint venture with Skyborn Renewables.
In resonse to the stop-work order, Revolution Wind LLC asked the court for a preliminary injunction on 1 January.
Second time around
This is the second time around for Revolution Wind. The Interior Department first tried to suspend it in August last year, but work resumed after the developers successfully sued for a preliminary injunction.
Ørsted said the latest injunction lets work resume while the underlying lawsuit challenging the August and December orders progresses.
Judge Lamberth took issue with the Interior Department’s rationale for the December stop-work order, which cited national security risks identified in “recently completed classified reports”.
“Purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation” for halting the scheme, he said from the bench, The New York Times reports.
In seeking its injunction, Ørsted said the scheme secured all required federal and state permits in 2023 after nine years of project reviews in consultation with the Military Aviation and Installation Assurance Siting Clearinghouse, an agency of the US Department of Defense.
More decisions to come
The December halt order will add to the DC District Court’s workload this month.
The five suspended projects are Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind; Equinor’s Empire Wind 1; Vineyard Wind 1, a joint venture of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid; and Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.
On 2 January, Equinor’s Empire Offshore Wind LLC filed a civil suit in the same court, saying it would also seek a preliminary injunction. On 6 January, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind LLC followed suit.
And on 9 January, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed two lawsuits against the Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind stop-work orders. Combined, these two schemes are set to power more than a million New York homes.
Empire Wind is 60% complete. By 2027, its 54 turbines were expected to generate 810MW to power 500,000 homes.
The 924MW Sunrise Wind scheme, which Ørsted has been building since it got final approval in June 2024, is 45% complete, with 44 of 84 turbine foundations installed. It had been expected to power 600,000 homes starting in 2027.
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