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Offshore wind developers are back to building three major U.S. projects nearly a month after the Trump administration ordered them to pause construction.
Ørsted, Equinor, and Dominion Energy all got the green light from federal judges last week to resume work on their massive, multibillion-dollar wind farms off America’s east coast. The companies wasted no time restarting the installation of turbines, offshore substations, and other equipment — eager to make up for delays that had cost each of them millions of dollars a day and threatened to tank at least one project that is more than halfway complete.
The developers had been stuck in limbo since receiving the Dec. 22 suspension order from the U.S. Interior Department, which cited unspecified “reasons of national security” — a rationale that failed to convince federal judges as they weighed developers’ requests for relief. Two other in-progress projects remain mired by delays as they await hearings.
The late-December order was the culmination of the Trump administration’s yearlong assault on offshore wind, which has managed to freeze new development but has been less successful in stopping projects already underway. Most of the five projects are in advanced stages of construction and viewed as critical by grid planners for keeping electricity reliable and affordable. These offshore wind farms are likely the only ones that will get built nationwide in the coming years because of Trump’s interventions.
Dominion Energy, which is developing the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, said it delivered the first batch of turbine components by ship to its leasing area off Virginia Beach, Virginia, last weekend and is now installing the first of its 176 turbines. All the turbine foundations are already in place for the $11.2 billion project, and the utility is working to start producing power in the first quarter of this year.
The wind farm is expected to supply 2.6 gigawatts of clean electricity to the grid when fully completed later this year — power that the region can’t afford to lose, according to the mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnection.
In a Jan. 13 court brief supporting Dominion Energy, PJM said the offshore wind project would help with the “acute need for new power generation to meet demand” in the 13-state region, much of which is being driven by the boom in AI data centers. “Further delay of the project will cause irreparable harm to the 67 million residents of this region that depend on continued reliable delivery of electricity,” according to PJM’s filing.
Meanwhile, off the coast of Rhode Island, Ørsted has resumed construction on the 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project, which was nearly 90% complete when the federal stop-work order came late last month. The Danish energy giant was hit with a similar order in August, which a federal judge lifted in September given the lack of any “factual findings” by the Trump administration.
Of Revolution Wind’s 65 wind turbines, 58 are already in place, as are the cables and substations needed to bring the power to shore. At the time of the December suspension, the $6.2 billion project had been expected to start generating power as soon as this month, according to Ørsted.
Equinor, which had also previously received a separate stop-work order, is back to work on its 810-MW Empire Wind project off the coast of Long Island, New York.
The developer recently warned that the $5 billion project, which is more than 60% complete, would likely face cancellation if work couldn’t resume by Jan. 16; it won a favorable ruling on Jan. 15. Molly Morris, president of Equinor Renewables America, said the project is using a heavy-lift vessel that is available at the project site only until February, The City reported. After that, Equinor wouldn’t have been able to lease the vessel for another year, creating untenable project delays.
A spokesperson for Equinor said the company now expects to complete work assigned to the vessel, which includes installing an offshore substation, following the injunction ruling.
Continuing construction on America’s offshore wind farms “is good news for stressed power grids on the East Coast,” Hillary Bright, executive director of the advocacy group Turn Forward, said in a statement last week. She added that if projects aren’t allowed to advance, the electricity system in the heavily populated region will be “more likely to experience reliability issues and see ratepayer bills soar.”
Americans’ utility bills are already climbing nationwide, owing in large part to the rising prices and constrained supplies of fossil gas. Residents in colder-climate states are especially feeling the squeeze this winter — though early data shows that existing offshore wind operations are helping reduce electricity costs in some places.
Vineyard Wind, a 800-MW wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, has been sending power to the grid from 30 of its planned 62 turbines since last October. On Dec. 7, an especially chilly day, the project’s wind output helped displace a significant amount of fossil gas on the wholesale market, resulting in savings of more than $2 million for New England ratepayers over the course of the day, Amanda Barker, the clean energy program manager with Green Energy Consumers Alliance, said on a Jan. 21 press call.
Vineyard Wind is one of the two projects waiting to resume construction in the wake of Interior’s December suspension order. Its developers, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, sued the federal government on Jan. 15, becoming the last of the affected firms to seek legal relief from the Trump administration’s attacks. Vineyard Wind is now 95% complete, with all but one of its turbines now hovering over the Atlantic Ocean.
The second stalled project, Sunrise Wind, is an Ørsted development off the coast of New York. The 924-MW wind farm is almost 50% complete and, before the stop-work order, was expected to come online in 2026. A court hearing for the development is scheduled for Feb. 2, and the delay is costing Ørsted millions of dollars in the meantime.
Overall, the court orders from last week represent a win for getting more electricity onto the grid during a time of rising demand — and another round of setbacks for Trump’s efforts to destroy the fledgling sector.
Still, it’s hard to say whether this marks the administration’s final attempt to stymie projects or whether more delay tactics are coming for America’s beleaguered offshore wind projects.
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