The developers behind Vineyard Wind, a large and nearly complete offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, are suing the Trump administration for halting construction on the project last month.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the developers argue the administration acted unlawfully and abused its statutory authority when it suspended the project’s lease, which ground construction to a halt. In a 52-page complaint, the plaintiffs also ask the court for a temporary restraining order that would allow the companies to get back to work immediately.
The lawsuit comes hours after a federal judge in a separate case ruled that construction could resume on Empire Wind, an offshore wind farm affected by the December order. Earlier this week, yet another judge ruled that construction could resume on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind project off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Both Empire Wind, which is 60% complete, and Revolution Wind, which is 87% complete, argued that any further delay in getting back to work may derail the projects’ timelines and force the developers to cancel them.
The Vineyard Wind project, in its complaint, made a similar plea for injunctive relief. The 62-turbine project has been under construction since 2021, and at the time of the stop-work order, was 95% complete and already generating power for the New England grid. The company said it has spent $4.5 billion on the project, and is losing about $2 million each day the project is shut down.
If the order remains in effect and construction is paused for 90 days, Vineyard Wind’s complaint said, it would be “unable to complete construction of the Project before it loses access to a specialized installation vessel that is under contract with Vineyard Wind only until March 31, 2026. The inability to timely complete construction of the Project in turn jeopardizes the revenues and financing necessary for the Project to remain viable.”
The complaint also alleges that the government’s purported reason for suspending work on the project is “arbitrary and capricious.” In it’s Dec. 22 order, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency within the U.S. Interior Department, said new classified information from the Department of Defense found that offshore wind turbines pose a national security risk. The agency ordered a 90-day pause in construction on five projects along the east coast to give it time to look into the matter more.
According to Vineyard Wind’s lawsuit, the developers reached out to the federal government to get more information about the concerns, but were rebuffed. Revolution Wind said its attempts to reach federal officials also failed because the agencies claimed the information was classified.
It’s long been known that offshore wind turbines can interfere with military radar and create what’s known as “clutter,” but there are technological ways to mitigate the issue.
In fact, during the multi-year permitting process for an offshore wind project, the Department of Defense plays a big role in vetting and assessing whether turbines pose a problem, and whether there are ways to work around it.
All five of the projects suspended last month received the greenlight from the Defense Department before beginning construction.
Late last month, after the suspension order came down, the New England regional grid operator, ISO- New England, issued a statement noting that Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind are “are particularly important to system reliability,” and that “canceling or delaying these projects will increase costs and risks to reliability in our region.”
Under the terms of the suspension, Vineyard Wind has been able to continue generating power. The project currently has 44 turbines up and running, providing up to 572 megawatts. At the time of the stop-work order, the project was scheduled to be complete by March 31, 2026, and able to deliver up to 800 megawatts — enough electricity to power 400,000 homes in the region.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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