US pauses offshore wind projects over national security concerns
The United States is immediately halting leases for offshore wind energy projects being built near the Atlantic coastline, citing security concerns.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that it was pausing five major sales projects to investigate how windmills could interfere with radars and create other risks for cities on the east coast.
President Donald Trump has long opposed wind energy, saying it is unreliable and increases costs, and has attempted to halt all projects when he returns to office. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said wind farms have no future in the U.S. energy grid.
State leaders, as well as renewable energy companies, have expressed concern about the administration’s stance.
The Home Office said in a statement that the pause “addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid development of relevant competing technologies and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects close to our population centers on the east coast.”
The five currently paused wind farms are being built off the coasts of New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
In particular, the announcement stated that authorities are concerned about radar interference “confusion” that could disguise real moving targets or, conversely, create false targets. He added that a radar’s false alarm detection threshold could be increased to reduce confusion, but only at the risk of missing real targets.
In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Burgum said wind projects could make it harder to “determine what friend and foe are in our airspace,” citing drone strikes between Russia and Ukraine and between Iran and Israel as examples.
Dominion Energy, the company behind the Virginia wind farm, said its project is offshore and “does not raise visual impact concerns.”
“The two pilot turbines of the project have been operating for five years without any impact on national security,” he said in the statement.
Democratic Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called the pause an “erratic” move that would “increase electricity prices in Connecticut and across the region.”
“This project is nearing completion and is providing good-paying clean energy jobs,” he added. “Businesses and residents deserve economic predictability, but they are left with the opposite because of the administration’s constant starts and stops.”
In early December, a federal judge rejected President Trump’s attempt to ban new wind energy projects in the United States, calling it “arbitrary, capricious and unlawful.”
On the first day of his administration in January, Trump issued a memorandum of understanding halting permits and new leases pending a federal review.
Five months later, 17 US states, led by New York, sued the administration, calling the ban an “existential” threat to the US wind industry.
