Judge rules offshore wind farm can resume construction work

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One month after the Trump administration ordered all work to stop at the Revolution Wind project, a federal judge said on Sept. 22 that construction of the offshore wind farm intended to serve Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume.

The ruling by Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia means Revolution Wind can restart construction while parent company Orsted pursues its lawsuit over the Aug. 22 order from the Trump administration.

It comes as federal officials are also scrutinizing other projects that could eventually benefit Massachusetts, including New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind. Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell’s office has also been involved in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s January directive ordering federal officials not to issue permits for wind projects before completion of a “comprehensive assessment” of leasing and permitting practices.

“Revolution Wind will continue to seek to work collaboratively with the US Administration and other stakeholders toward a prompt resolution,” the company said in a statement. “Revolution Wind will resume impacted construction work as soon as possible, with safety as the top priority.”

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management halted work at Revolution Wind, which is about 80 percent complete, in August citing “concerns related to the protection of national security interests.” In late August, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum detailed some of those concerns in an interview on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins” podcast.

“There are concerns about radar relative to undersea, and it doesn’t have to be a large Russian sub, but undersea drones, the new technology,” Burgum said. He added, “People with, you know, bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm. The radar gets very distorted around detecting, if you’re trying to have, you know, detect and avoid if you’ve got drones coming.”

CT Mirror reported that Lamberth said during a Sept. 22 hearing that the Trump administration had provided no new information to justify its stop-work order and called it “the height of arbitrary and capacious action.”