This story was originally published by Canary Media.
A U.S. federal judge has ruled that Danish wind giant Ørsted can resume the construction of its nearly complete, 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.
The decision Monday comes after the Trump administration issued stop-work orders to all five of the offshore wind projects under development in the U.S. in late December, the culmination of Donald Trump’s year-long war against the renewable energy source, Canary Media reports.
Revolution Wind, a US$6.2-billion project that is nearly 90% complete, was hit with an earlier federal stop-work order in August from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a division of the Interior Department. A federal judge ruled in favour of Ørsted in September, allowing the project to move forward until December’s order, which cited unspecified issues of “national security.”
On Monday, the Danish developer said it will “resume construction work as soon as possible” while its complaint against the Trump administration is heard by the courts.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who issued the injunction, said from the bench on Monday that the bureau’s August suspension order was “the height of arbitrary and capricious” and that the December order’s vague claims of national security risks did “not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Revolution Wind project.” He noted that the government’s argument for halting construction was “unreasonable and seemingly unjustified.”
Each offshore wind project has been repeatedly vetted by the Department of Defense since being proposed, and developers said they were blindsided by the Trump administration’s latest security concerns.
Ørsted and two other offshore wind developers, Equinor and Dominion Energy Virginia, all sued to vacate the Trump administration’s 90-day construction freeze from December. Ørsted’s court hearing was the first, and judges are set to consider the fate of the other in-progress offshore wind projects this week.
On Wednesday, a court promised to rule quickly on Equinor’s 810-MW Empire Wind project, which also previously received and defeated a stop-work order. A hearing for Dominion Energy’s massive 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is scheduled for Friday. In addition to energy developers, the states of Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island have all sued to get the projects going again.
The stakes are high: In total, the five offshore wind farms affected by the Trump administration’s December order would bring nearly 6 GW of capacity to the grid, enough to power roughly 2.5 million average U.S. homes across the country’s east coast.
The U.S. can’t afford to lose any of these projects. Energy demand is climbing across the nation, causing household utility bills to soar. More power plants are needed to keep bills from rising even further—especially in regions swamped with power-hungry data centres, like Virginia.
In addition, grid operators have been banking on the arrival of these large-scale offshore wind projects, several of which are more than half complete. In August, ISO-New England issued an unprecedented warning that the Trump administration’s first pause on Revolution Wind created “unpredictable risks” that could “undermine the power grid’s reliability and the region’s economy now and in the future.”
At least one project could be abandoned imminently. Equinor, which already lost nearly $1 billion because of the first stop-work order on Empire Wind, says the beleaguered project faces “likely termination” if it can’t continue work by this Friday.
Meanwhile, industry groups applauded Monday’s decision.
Kat Burnham, the New England policy lead for Advanced Energy United, said the DC court “rightly saw through a politically motivated stop-work order that would have caused real harm: driving up costs, delaying power for Rhode Island and Connecticut, and putting good-paying jobs at risk.” In a statement, she said the decision is “good news for workers, ratepayers, and anyone who recognizes the need for a fair energy market.”
The latest skirmish over offshore wind comes after a year of assault from the Trump administration. Trump has gummed up the buildout of onshore wind and solar power, too—but no energy source has been targeted like offshore wind.
The impact of Trump’s war on the sector is profound.
When he was re-elected in 2024, BloombergNEF expected 39 GW of offshore wind capacity to come online in the U.S. by 2035. The research group hedged that number to 21.5 GW if Trump managed to repeal wind tax credits during his term. He did. As of October, BNEF expected just 6 GW to get online by 2035—a number that will be even lower if any of the in-progress projects buckle under the weight of the latest order.
