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In December, the Trump administration issued a sweeping stop-work order to every single offshore wind installation underway in America. But, as of today, all five projects have either resumed construction or received the green light from judges to do so.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the 924-megawatt Sunrise Wind project, located off the coast of New York, can resume construction. The wind farm is nearly halfway complete and, before the stop-work order, was expected to begin producing electricity this year.
Ørsted said in a statement that it will “restart impacted activities immediately.”
The December order had cited ambiguous national security concerns in halting construction of Sunrise Wind and the other offshore wind farms. But Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found this justification insufficient after reviewing the classified report detailing those threats. He granted project developer Ørsted a preliminary injunction that allows work to proceed as the complaint moves through the legal system.
It’s the fifth such court order in recent weeks, and a welcome reprieve for a sector that promises to provide huge amounts of clean electricity to the East Coast in a time of surging demand.
In mid-January, the 704-MW Revolution Wind project, which is being developed off the coast of Rhode Island by Ørsted, became the first to receive an injunction. By the end of the month, every project aside from Sunrise Wind had secured a similar ruling and restarted work. Vineyard Wind, an installation so close to completion that it is already partially supplying power to the New England grid, was the latest to do so. Its final turbine tower left the New Bedford, Massachusetts, port last Wednesday.
The December order from the Trump administration ground construction of the megaprojects to a halt, costing developers millions of dollars, delaying the arrival of much-needed new electricity, and threatening the outright cancellation of the multibillion-dollar developments.
It also capped off a yearlong assault from the Trump administration against the emerging sector.
That assault has largely been successful. Offshore wind was once seen as the future cornerstone of Northeastern grids, but now only a fraction of what was once planned for the next decade is likely to get built: Research firm BloombergNEF slashed its forecast for 2035 offshore wind capacity by a staggering 85% between November 2024 and October 2025.
But the Trump administration has, so far, failed to permanently stop the construction of the five projects already underway. It’s not for lack of trying.
Last April, the administration issued a stop-work order to New York’s Empire Wind, one of the five projects that was halted by the December order as well.
The developer, Norway’s partially state-owned energy firm Equinor, declined to sue over the April order and instead lobbied the Trump administration behind the scenes. The administration lifted the order after about one month, which White House officials said was the result of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) agreeing to support new gas pipelines in the state. Hochul denied those allegations, but her administration green-lit one such project in November.
The Trump administration issued another stop-work order in August — this time to Revolution Wind. Ørsted immediately challenged the directive in court and was granted relief a month later.
Rather than targeting any individual project, the December order took a dragnet approach, citing still-unclear national security risks. The Trump administration has yet to publicly release details regarding the alleged threats.
Similarly, the administration has refused to share a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that it said justified the April stop-work order on the Empire Wind project.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from E&E News, the administration last year released a copy of the report that was almost entirely redacted. Instead of providing damning evidence that the Biden administration had rushed the project’s approval or relied on flawed science, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had claimed at the time, the file contains a cover sheet and research references — and about two dozen pages of black rectangles.
It’s unclear where the administration will go from here. Several of the five now-unpaused projects will be complete, or at least begin producing power, if they can continue unabated for even a few more months.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the prospects for the energy source are very different.
Last Monday, 10 European nations banded together to announce a plan to install 100 gigawatts of offshore wind in the North Sea. The agreement was motivated in part by Europe’s desire to forge its own path on energy as it grows less comfortable with relying on natural gas imports from an increasingly erratic and hostile United States.
Just days before, in fact, President Donald Trump took time out of his World Economic Forum speech in Davos, Switzerland, to complain about wind turbines — and to call European nations “losers” for installing them.
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