A Mighty Wind: Judge Blows Down Trump's Dumb Executive Order Against Wind Energy

Gone with the breeze, it is.

The Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island. Photo by the wind farm’s developer, Ørsted.

In a blow to Donald Trump’s irrational war against wind energy, a federal judge in Massachusetts on Monday overturned Trump’s Day One executive order that had frozen all leases and permits for offshore wind energy projects. Seventeen states, led by New York but reaching across the country to Oregon and California, had joined the lawsuit, arguing that they and their residents were being harmed by the refusal to add clean, cheaper energy to the grid. US District Judge Patti Saris agreed, writing in her order that the “Wind Order” was illegal because it was an “arbitrary and capricious” exercise of federal power, not to mention weird and creepy.

Trump’s order placed an indefinite pause on all offshore wind energy development so that federal agencies could “review” the permitting process, supposedly to remove any of those mean unfair advantages that Joe Biden used to oppress wind’s poor, downtrodden competitors in the fossil fuel industry. As testimony in the case showed, however, hardly any such “review” had even begun, even 10 months after the order. There wasn’t even a concept of a plan for regulatory review, because the point was simply to prevent new wind energy from coming online at all.

In fact, lawyers for the administration agencies involved couldn’t demonstrate any real rationale for the stonewalling on permits beyond pointing to Trump’s executive order and the Department of the Interior’s memo putting the pause into place. Judge Saris wrote that the thin justifications given in those documents alone were insufficient to effectively shut down an entire industry. “Whatever level of explanation is required when deviating from longstanding agency practice, this is not it.”

OK, you were waiting for the “However,” weren’t you? Here we go: However, the order on its own doesn’t automatically approve any pending wind projects, and as Ars Technica explains, Judge Saris’s order can’t force the relevant agencies to stop simply slow-walking every project that’s in the pipeline, as well as new leases or permits. But it does at least mean that states and offshore wind developers can go ahead and sue the government for gumming up the process simply because Trump hates wind turbines and wants to protect dirty energy.

In fact, one such lawsuit, brought by the Danish wind energy company Ørsted, has already successfully lifted the administration’s stop-work order on a giant wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. When it’s completed next year, the 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project, initially approved in 2023, will bring carbon-free electricity to more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. But in August, the administration ordered a halt to construction, even though Revolution Wind was more than 80 percent complete, claiming that the plant was somehow a “national security” threat.

The stop-work order didn’t get into specifics, probably because it would have been laughed out of court, because when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tried to explain it on CNN, he came up with some weird speculation about how, ummm, let’s see, what if the wind turbines kept radar from detecting a big attack by, umm, “undersea drones” launched inside US territorial waters? That makes no goddamn sense at all because radar doesn’t work underwater and the Pentagon has already studied the possibility of wind turbines affecting radar, concluding that any minor interference can be “offset with planning and technological upgrades.” You fucking idiots.

As it was, DC Circuit Judge Royce Lamberth in September granted Ørsted’s request to lift the stop-work order while its suit against the government goes forward, and work has resumed on Revolution Wind. In fact, in November, the administration missed its chance to appeal Lamberth’s order, although it remains just as insanely devoted to favoring oil and gas over renewable energy.

As for Monday’s decision overturning the Wind Order, the White House’s first response was, as always, to whine. White House Spokesperson Taylor Rogers groused that darn it, that nasty old Joe Biden had given wind preferential treatment while being unspeakably cruel to fossil fuels, which is a difficult lie to reconcile with the fact that US oil production reached historically high levels during the Biden administration.

Still, Rogers, like every other Trumper, offered the same line every other administration hack does on any energy story, proclaiming that “President Trump has ended Joe Biden’s war on American energy and unleashed America’s energy dominance to protect our economic and national security.” Why no, Rogers didn’t say anything specific about the ruling or whether the administration will try to pursue the case in the Supreme Court.

That’s virtually the same as the non-answer that fellow spokesbot Anna Kelly offered last month when asked if the administration would appeal to try to stop Revolution Wind: “In just a few months, President Trump has ended Joe Biden’s war on American energy and restored American energy dominance,” blah blah blah, with no mention of the wind farm or the judge’s decision.

Now that Judge Saris has deflated Trump’s Wind Order, states and companies will still need to sue to move wind projects forward, causing costly delays and probably killing some projects altogether, so progress will remain slow. US offshore wind may remain stymied until Trump is out of office, putting us farther and farther behind the rest of the world, which is all in on renewables. All the more reason to keep up the pressure to retake Congress and fight Trump’s climate stupidity at every step. For now, at least, states that want cleaner, more affordable energy for the long term have one less roadblock in their way.

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[Guardian / Ars Technica / Order in New York v. Trump / Canary Media]

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