Key Takeaways
The Trump administration has halted construction across the U.S. offshore wind sector, pausing leases for all five major projects under construction after the Pentagon found that turbine structures could interfere with critical military radar systems, potentially obscuring real targets or generating false signals.
Interior cited radar interference — “clutter” — as a concern caused by offshore wind projects.
Last year, Sweden banned offshore wind in the Baltic Sea due to national security concerns, indicating the presence of offshore wind facilities would reduce the warning time for potential missile strikes from several minutes to just 60 seconds.
The pause will give the administration time to work with leaseholders and states to assess the possibility of mitigating the risks.
The Trump Interior Department ordered a halt to construction of all five offshore wind projects currently being built in the United States, pausing all leases for large-scale offshore wind projects that are currently under construction due to national security issues. The pauses affect the Vineyard Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Sunrise Wind, and Empire Wind 1 projects. According to Politico, the national security risks were identified by the Department of Defense in “recently completed classified reports.” An unclassified report from the Energy Department had found that wind facilities could interfere with radar systems. Wind projects can create risks because the movement of turbine blades, combined with their reflective towers, can create radar interference, called “clutter,” making it difficult to identify legitimate moving targets.
Via Politico, the department cited a 2024 report that stated that radar’s threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some clutter, but “an increased detection threshold” could cause radar to miss targets. Agencies are testing mitigation approaches to manage turbine-related radar clutter, including adjustments to existing radar processing systems. The pause will give the administration time to work with leaseholders and states to assess the possibility of mitigating the risks. Last year, Sweden banned offshore wind in the Baltic Sea, rejecting 13 applications due to national security concerns. The issue of wind turbines affecting military radar has been extant for decades, with the Sierra Club suing the Department of Defense as early as 2006 regarding incomplete studies for onshore wind operations.
The Empire Wind project off the coast of New York had previously been halted by the administration in April, and the Revolution Wind project was blocked in August. Both pauses were ultimately lifted — one after Trump struck a deal with New York for the construction of natural gas pipelines in the state and the other after a federal judge intervened. In another case, a federal court in Maryland denied a request by US Wind to block a potential review of its approved offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland. In a memorandum opinion, the United States District Court for the District of Maryland ruled that US Wind had not met the legal threshold for a preliminary injunction.
According to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, “One natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects combined,” and he indicated that the five paused projects were “expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized.” As explained by the National Center for Energy Analytics, the subsidization is massive as the amount of federal tax expenditures allocated for renewables and end users in fiscal year 2025 alone surpassed the aggregate total for fossil fuels over the entire fiscal 1994–2025 period ($50.8 billion).”
Via the New York Times, on his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order halting all leasing of federal lands and waters for new wind facilities. A federal judge this month struck down the halt on leasing mandated by the January order, saying it was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated federal law.
Status of the Halted Projects
Vineyard Wind 1, located about 15 miles south of the Massachusetts islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, is slated to include 62 wind turbines, each spaced by one nautical mile apart. About half of those turbines are operational.
Revolution Wind, a project located off the coast of Rhode Island, is 80% completed, according to its website. It is operated by Danish renewable energy company Orsted, which indicated that the delay would cost approximately $15 million per week. The project involves installing 65 large wind turbines, two offshore substations, interconnecting cables, and an export cable. Revolution Wind has invested roughly $5 billion in the project and expects to incur an additional $1 billion in breakaway costs if it were permanently halted.
Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is the largest offshore wind project in the United States, with 176 turbines. The project was projected to be up and running by the end of 2026, according to its website. According to a letter Dominion received, the pause would be for 90 days and could be extended.
Orsted’s Sunrise Wind, located about 30 miles from the coast of New York’s Long Island, was expected to be operating in 2027, according to its website.
Empire Wind, also located off Long Island, is under construction. The company constructing Empire Wind is Equinor, who indicated that the project is 60% complete and that dozens of vessels had been working on it. When work on Empire Wind was initially paused in April, Equinor said it was losing $50 million a week. Empire Wind 1 has a design capacity of 810 megawatts and is expected to begin commercial operation in 2027. The project renegotiated its contracts, settling for a fee of $150.15 per megawatt-hour, which is about three times the price of natural gas-fired generation.
Only a small wind facility off Rhode Island that began operating in 2016 to supply energy for Block Island, which was used to high electricity prices, was not affected by the ban.
Sweden Blocks Offshore Wind Due to National Security Issues
Sweden’s government has blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms in the Baltic Sea and suspended another project off the island of Gotland after the military warned that the turbines could undermine national security. The Swedish Armed Forces said the large rotating blades and tower structures would interfere with radar systems, degrading the country’s ability to detect airborne threats such as cruise missiles. Several of the proposed projects were located near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, one of Europe’s most heavily militarized regions, situated between Poland and Lithuania. Defense officials warned that the wind farms could sharply compress Sweden’s early-warning window in the event of an attack, cutting detection times from several minutes to as little as 60 seconds.
Analysis
Offshore wind facilities are generally expensive to build, and achieving economies of scale is difficult. After the COVID-19 lockdown and supply chain issues became a problem, the offshore-wind business became further financially troubled by higher wages and interest rates, which drove up the cost of borrowing, and a global shortage of vessels needed to haul turbines and their foundations from ports to job sites in the ocean. Several offshore wind projects were delayed, and financing was ultimately renegotiated to reflect higher costs for several of the halted projects. In many cases, high costs and intermittency make offshore wind a poor choice for generating electricity.
However, the Trump administration’s antagonism toward previously approved offshore wind projects raises concerns that a future administration could use executive power to stall other energy projects — as evidenced by actions taken by the Obama and Biden administrations.
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