Last week brought some good news for the East Coast’s struggling offshore wind industry.
Federal courts ruled three times for developers of northeast projects — one of them being New London-based Revolution Wind — which so far have succeeded, barely, in fighting back against the Trump administration’s continuing effort to shut them down.
Trump has long opposed offshore wind turbines, dismissing them as ugly threats to bird and marine life that, if completed, will produce unreliable and prohibitively expensive electricity.
But the administration’s latest stop work order — turned back at last temporarily in court by Revolution, New York’s Empire Wind and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind — is based on the claim that a classified Pentagon report, one too secret to discuss, has identified offshore wind turbines as a threat to national security.
The security claim has met skepticism not only in court, but in Congress and elsewhere. The administration and Pentagon have so far refused to elaborate, but there is widespread belief that the claim is based on concern that enormous, revolving windmill blades interfere with military radar by producing unwanted images known as clutter.
If that is the claim, the wind industry and its supporters say the potential problem was identified by the Pentagon and resolved to its satisfaction years ago.
In multiple reports and other records, the U.S. Department of Interior bureau in charge of offshore energy leases, acknowledges it has consulted continuously with a variety of U.S. military agencies and that their concerns about equipment, training and operation have been “mitigated.”
A 2023 report notes that Revolution Wind’s developers paid tens of thousands of dollars at one point for a software patch to alleviate U.S. Air Force radar issues. A letter the following year from the Department of Defense to the Revolution developers said the project “would not have adverse impacts to DoD missions in the area.”
Whatever the reason for its latest concern, the Pentagon won’t talk about it, even when pressed by powerful members of Congress with seats on committees that control the defense budget and weapons procurement.
The Pentagon politely brushed off a request for information from U.S. Rep Joe Courtney, D-2. The Navy regularly briefs Courtney on classified matters in his position as ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower subcommittee, which oversees the country’s top defense priority, the Columba ballistic missile submarines built by Electric Boat in Groton.
Defense staff told Courtney’s office last week that they are unable to discuss whatever the problem may be with offshore windmills — while emphasizing their continuing respect for the House armed services committee’s oversight responsibilities.
On Thursday, four senior House Democrats with ranking committee assignments wrote to both the Defense Department and Interior Department asking for briefings on the security risks of offshore wind.
“The Department of Defense said this has to be handled by the Department of the Interior, which is crazy if it is a national security issue,” Courtney said. “And by the way, we deal with classified information and get classified briefings all the time.”
There is a lot at stake on the future of the northeast offshore wind industry, in particular for Courtney, whose district includes down-at-the-heels New London, which is starting to look like the historically important seaport it once was as a result of billions of dollars being spent by the offshore wind industry.
Norwegian multinational Orsted, which is building Revolution Wind, was a substantial investor in the $300 million rebuild that turned the decrepit State Pier in New London into a state-of-the-art supply hub for construction and maintenance of offshore wind farms including Revolution Wind, which is going up about 25 miles to the southeast.
Orsted has signed a 10-year lease on the pier, across the harbor from Electric Boat, for millions more. For more than a year, the pier has been packed with massive turbine components, some standing nearly as high as the nearby Gold Star Memorial Bridge, awaiting ferrying by hi-tech ships for erection on the continental shelf.
Orsted said in court that it has spent at least $5 billion on offshore wind development and has hired 2,000 people for construction, many associated with New London pier operations. It said it plans to create hundreds more jobs in operations and maintenance — if it is permitted to continue working.
Revolution Wind is the only offshore wind project in which Connecticut has a stake. In late 2024, Gov. Ned Lamont unexpectedly pulled out of an agreement with Massachusetts and Rhode Island to buy electricity from a second wind project, saying the price of the energy on that deal was too high.
Revolution, a cluster of wind turbines south of Block Island, is supposed to help Connecticut meet an aggressive legislative mandate to obtain 2,000 megawatts of energy from offshore wind by 2030. The project is supposed to inject 880 megawatts of power into the New England electric grid. Of that, Connecticut is committed under two contracts drawn in 2019 to buying 304 megawatts, enough to power more than 100,000 homes.
The Trump administration has tried and so far failed twice to shut down Revolution and other projects, in August and again in December. The December order, according to a court filing, was to “suspend all ongoing activities related to the Revolution Wind Project on the Outer Continental Shelf for the next 90 days for reasons of national security.”
Orsted said that Revolution Wind is 87 percent complete. Faced with the second “suspension” in four months, the company argued in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. last week that, because of power delivery and ship leasing commitments, “Revolution Wind now once again faces enterprise-level threats.”
Ruling from the bench in favor of Orsted, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said that in order for the administration to prevail in its order to shut down work on Revolution it needed to show a national emergency “and demonstrated findings of particularized harm that cannot be averted short of a total stop to project activity.”
“I’m not persuaded that any such emergency exists in this case,” he said.
Revolution Wind, already has had to clear myriad federal permitting requirements, over a decade or more of planning and construction. Courtney said the extensive project record shows the Pentagon has been involved throughout and any concerns it had about military planning, training, equipment or operations have been satisfied.
“Orsted and the Navy and the Department of Defense have been working on this for years,” Courtney said. ”The Air Force was involved.”
Over those years, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Interior Department agency in charge of offshore energy leasing, at least a dozen federal agencies were consulted on the plans, including the Department of Defense; the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard; the Federal Aviation Administration; and the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said in an August 2023 report that “at each stage of the regulatory process involving” the Revolution project it “has consulted with the Department of Defense for the purposes of assessing national security considerations in its decision-making processes.”
The reports reference, among other things, Air Force defensive radar installations designed to detect incoming air attacks. Impediments to U.S. Navy training also was a consideration. Submarines stationed at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in Groton pass close to the Revolution lease area while heading to and returning from sea.
“There is an open ended agreement for Orsted to continue to work with the government if there are new issues that arise,” Courtney said. “The problem is, halt work orders go out and Orsted gets no clue as to what the problem is.
“The question is, does this justify a halt work order? This is where the judge, I think, has been on target. The project involves billions of dollars of investment and all the permitting approvals. There is no justification to just shut it down. If there is some new question, it’s not like they can’t get Orsted to sit down and talk. The judge gave the government a chance to justify this thing and there was nothing there.”
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