A federal judge has ruled that Ørsted can resume the construction of its nearly complete, 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.
The decision on Monday comes after the Trump administration issued stop-work orders to all five of the offshore wind projects under development in the U.S. in late December, the culmination of President Donald Trump’s yearlong war against the renewable energy source
Revolution Wind, a $6.2 billion project that is nearly 90% complete, was hit with an earlier federal stop-work order in August from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a division of the Interior Department. A federal judge ruled in favor of Ørsted in September, allowing the project to move forward until December’s order, which cited unspecified issues of “national security.”
On Monday, the Danish developer said it will “resume construction work as soon as possible” while its complaint against the Trump administration is heard by the courts.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who issued the injunction, said from the bench on Monday that the bureau’s August suspension order was “the height of arbitrary and capricious” and that the December order’s vague claims of national security risks did “not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Revolution Wind project.” He noted that the government’s argument for halting construction was “unreasonable and seemingly unjustified.”
Each offshore wind project has been repeatedly vetted by the Department of Defense since being proposed, and developers said they were blindsided by the Trump administration’s latest security concerns.
Ørsted and two other offshore-wind developers, Equinor and Dominion Energy Virginia, all sued to vacate the Trump administration’s 90-day construction freeze from December. Ørsted’s court hearing was the first, and judges are set to consider the fate of the other in-progress offshore wind projects this week.
On Wednesday, a court could decide on Equinor’s 810-MW Empire Wind project, which also previously received and defeated a stop-work order. A hearing for Dominion Energy’s massive 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is scheduled for Friday. In addition to energy developers, the states of Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island have all sued to get the projects going again.
The stakes are high: In total, the five offshore wind farms affected by the Trump administration’s December order would bring nearly 6 GW of capacity to the grid, or enough to power roughly 2.5 million homes across the East Coast.
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