The Department of the Interior announced Monday that it is pausing the leases for “all large-scale offshore wind projects under construction” in the United States due to “national security risks” identified in “recently completed classified reports.”
The action affects five major offshore wind farms under development in federal waters off the East Coast: the largest U.S. project, the 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind; the 800-MW Vineyard Wind 1 offshore Massachussetts; the 700-MW Revolution Wind offshore Rhode Island; and the 2-GW Empire Wind and 924-MW Sunrise Wind, both offshore New York.
Interior said the pause will 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 the national security risks posed by these projects.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the release that the projects posed risks due to “the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers.”
The release went on to say that “massive turbine blades and the highly reflective towers” create radar interference that “obscures legitimate moving targets and generates false targets in the vicinity of the wind projects.”
But in a post on X, Burgum suggested factors other than national security played into the decision.
“ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED,” Burgum tweeted, calling offshore wind “expensive, unreliable,” and “heavily subsidized.”
President Donald Trump is “bringing common sense back to energy policy & putting security FIRST!,” he added.
In a Monday release responding to the announcement, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind owner and developer Dominion Energy said the project is "essential for American national security and meeting Virginia’s dramatically growing energy needs, the fastest growth in America."
Virginia’s demand growth “is driven by the need to provide reliable power to many of America’s most important war fighting installations, the world’s largest warship manufacturer, and the largest concentration of data centers on the planet as well as the leading edge of the AI revolution," Dominion said.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is expected to come fully online in late 2026.
Vineyard Wind 1, a joint venture from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid, is slated to do so in mid-2026 after a series of delays. Revolution Wind, an Ørsted and Global Infrastructure Partners joint venture which was previously delayed by a stop-work order from the Trump administration, should be completed in the second half of 2026. Both Sunrise Wind, owned by Ørsted, and Empire Wind, owned by Equinor, are expected to begin operating in 2027.
A coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in 2024 over the development of Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. The two parties in the suit said in a Wednesday joint filing that “DOI plans to conduct a review in which it will consider if [a lease] remand would be appropriate” and requested that a stay in the case be granted until Feb. 2.
The filing said that counsel for Dominion Energy consented to the stay but did not “concede the propriety” of any review or remand of the project’s lease.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a quote from Dominion Energy.
