Dive Brief:
- All five offshore wind farms that had their operations suspended by a stop work order from the Department of the Interior in December have been cleared by federal courts to resume construction, with the fifth wind farm — Ørsted’s 924-MW Sunrise Wind — receiving a preliminary injunction on Monday.
- Like the other impacted developers, Ørsted alleged in court that the government refused to divulge information about the national security risks it cited as the reason for freezing all offshore wind construction. The company said that stopping work on Sunrise Wind was costing it more than $1.25 million per day on the $7 billion project.
- Bryan Stockton, head of federal and regulatory affairs at Ørsted, said in a Jan. 12 statement to the court that as of the signing of his statement, the federal defendants had not “provided or even begun to facilitate [[providing]] Sunrise Wind’s technical experts nor its eligible counsel with access to the information relied upon by [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] or to provide unclassified summaries” of the rationale used for the freeze.
Dive Insight:
The ruling from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s Judge Royce Lamberth will allow the project to restart impacted activities immediately while Ørsted’s underlying lawsuit progresses, the company said in a Monday release.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
A blog post from the Natural Resources Defense Council praised Lamberth’s ruling but noted that these preliminary injunctions are temporary solutions to the underlying dispute.
“The road doesn’t end here,” NRDC said. “The courts are doing their job: preventing an unlawful, economically reckless halt while the cases proceed.”
Sunrise is the fifth and final project to win an injunction against the Trump administration’s latest effort to halt offshore wind development.
The other four projects targeted by the stop work order were the 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the 800-MW Vineyard Wind 1 offshore Massachusetts, the 700-MW Revolution Wind offshore Rhode Island and the 2-GW Empire Wind offshore New York.
Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, is the same judge who ruled on Jan. 12 to allow Revolution Wind to resume operations.
When announcing the suspension on Dec. 22, the Interior Department alleged that offshore wind projects posed “national security risks” identified in “recently completed classified reports.” It said a pause would give it, along with the Defense Department and “other relevant government agencies,” time to “work with leaseholders and state partners to assess the possibility of mitigating” those risks.
But representatives for the affected projects have denied in court that the administration has tried to work with them or provided any further information about those alleged national security risks.
The developers of Vineyard Wind, who won an injunction last week, said they “repeatedly” reached out to the relevant government agencies, but that officials “refused to discuss the supposedly new information” about national security risks.
Dominion Energy Virginia, which is building the Coastal Virginia project, made a similar claim, telling a judge that the government was departing from normal protocol by refusing to discuss security risks with operators of critical infrastructure.
Stockton said that when Ørsted representatives met with Matt Giacona, BOEM’s acting director, on Dec. 30, “BOEM did not facilitate or accommodate the request or otherwise allow Sunrise Wind representatives with [top secret] security clearances access to the classified information.”
Following the ruling, Ørsted said it would try to work with the Trump administration to “achieve an expeditious and durable resolution.”
“The project will resume construction work as soon as possible, with safety as the top priority, to deliver affordable, reliable power to the State of New York,” it said.
