A year after the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind projects began producing electricity, an expected fight over the future of the energy source has kicked into a higher gear that could spell trouble for other projects underway or on the drawing board.
On May 5, 17 state attorneys general filed suit challenging President Donald Trump’s January executive order for a “temporary withdrawal of all areas on the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing and review of the federal government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.”
The suit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, claims the order was unlawful and seeks to stop government agencies from carrying it out.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the AG coalition, said in a statement announcing the action that the presidential order was arbitrary and unnecessary and was “delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet,” threatening the “loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments” in the process.
That transition took a big step forward early last year when projects off New York’s Long Island and Massachusetts’ Cape Cod became the first large-scale ones to begin delivering power to utility customers. The South Fork project in New York is delivering 130MW of power from 12 turbines to Long Island and the Vineyard I project in Massachusetts began with five of a planned 62 turbines generating 68MW of electricity to the state.
The AG suit quickly follows another Trump administration action to halt a specific offshore wind project now under construction. In April, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, acting on a directive from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, ordered a halt to work on a project underway off New York’s Long Island that could eventually provide electricity to a half-million homes in the state. Construction on the expected 54-turbine Empire Wind project began in February 2024 following approval by the Biden administration in late 2023.
In an April 16 letter to Empire Offshore Wind LLC, owned by Norway-based energy company Equinor, the agency directed a halt to all ongoing activities to “allow time for it to address feedback it has received, including from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about the environmental analyses for that project.” The letter references Trump’s January executive order, saying that the directive grows out of that broad review now underway of U.S. offshore wind projects that may pose environmental risks that haven’t been fully investigated.
Equinor, in a press release announcing the order, said it would comply by having its contractors initiate suspension of construction activities being performed by some 1,500 workers. But it also said it was considering a legal challenge to the order, citing the project’s securing of all necessary federal and state permits, a federal lease for the waters where the project is sited dating to 2017 and an energy supply contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
Disruptive as the recent federal actions are, they aren’t the only source of trouble for the wind power industry. Costs to start or complete wind projects have been growing, abetted by supply chain snarls and shortages, making original bets by investors look more iffy. Some developers have pulled the plug on projects and others have been put on ice until there is more clarity on viability, a concern compounded by new regulatory challenges.
Any prolonged slowdown or extensive shelving of offshore wind projects would have a ripple effect extending down to designers and contractors engaged in planning and building the extensive and complex infrastructure needed to generate offshore power, bring it to land and distribute it to customers.
Prospects for growing offshore power generation have opened up new opportunities for specialists in the field, electrical contractors among them, and their operations could be vulnerable if a moratorium on offshore wind power, or worse, occurs.
One such firm, Chapman Construction Group, a Sandwich, Mass., electrical contractor, has played a central role in the Vineyard I project (see Photo). Still in the early stages of development, and set to be followed by a second phase, that project could be at risk. On its webpage, Chapman touts its critical management and coordination role in the project, extending beyond electrical to include workers in various trades. The entire project, organized under a project labor agreement, it says, “will create 3,600 full-time equivalent jobs and under the PLA at least 500 of the jobs created during the construction phase of the project are guaranteed to be filled by local union workers.”
