(AFP) – The US Interior Department on Monday said it had paused leases for all five of the country’s offshore wind projects under construction, citing unspecified national security risks and casting new doubt over the future of an industry detested by President Donald Trump. The Republican president has long expressed opposition to windmills, particularly over their appearance, and his administration has made multiple attempts to limit their implementation during his second term.
The Interior Department pointed in its announcement to national security risks from the projects, all off the Atlantic coast, that the Pentagon outlined in “recently completed” classified reports. The move comes weeks after a judge ruled that a blanket ban on new offshore permits — signed by Trump on his first day in office in January — was illegal. The Interior Department did not specify what the risks were, but it noted that the Department of Energy had also previously identified potential issues related to radar interference. The pause, effective immediately, would provide time to mitigate the government’s concerns, the Interior Department said.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said the move “looks more like the kind of vindictive harassment we have come to expect from the Trump administration than anything legitimate.” The Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island’s coast, developed by Danish energy giant Orsted, is 80 percent complete, according to its website. Whitehouse said on X that the project had long ago been “thoroughly vetted and fully permitted by the federal government, and that review included any potential national security questions.”
Dominion Energy, which is behind a massive wind farm off the Virginia coast, said similarly that its project “has been more than ten years in the works, involved close coordination with the military, and is located…so far offshore it does not raise visual impact concerns.” The company said it had been ordered to halt work for 90 days, while warning that stopping the project will “lead to energy inflation and threaten thousands of jobs.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, seen as close to the fossil fuel industry, expressed concerns for more than just security issues in a post on X, bashing the wind projects as “expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized offshore wind farms.” “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED,” the former Republican governor wrote. Wind energy represents about 10 percent of US power production, almost entirely from land-based turbines. Other projects targeted by Monday’s order include the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts, and the New York-area Sunrise and Empire projects.
Trump has long complained that windmills ruin views and are expensive. During a trip this summer to one of his UK golf courses, the US president urged Britain to stop subsidizing the “ugly monsters.” In addition to his order attempting to ban new wind farm permits, Trump’s administration has also moved to block all federal loans for wind energy. “We should not be kneecapping America’s largest source of renewable power, especially when we need more cheap, homegrown electricity,” the Environmental Defense Fund’s lead counsel Ted Kelly said in a statement.
New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul said on X that she was working with other impacted states “to review every available option to get these projects back on track.” Dominion Energy’s stock price closed down around 3.7 percent, while Danish energy giant Orsted — behind the Revolution Wind project — was down 11 percent.
– Charlotte Causit and Nina Iseni
© 2024 AFP
