The Justice Department asked courts to undo approvals for three offshore wind farms, one already making power

The Justice Department has filed motions in three federal court cases asking judges to revoke Interior Department approvals for offshore wind projects. Revolution Wind, a 700-megawatt farm off the New England coast, is one of the three, and it has been feeding electricity into the regional grid since March. The other two, Maryland Offshore Wind and New England Wind, have not started building.

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The motions put an operating power plant in the same legal basket as two developments that exist mostly on paper. Utility Dive reported them on October 22.

Three projects, three separate cases

According to Utility Dive’s reporting, the requests ask judges to set aside the Interior Department’s approvals of each project’s construction and operation plan, the master document that governs how a lease is built and run. Maryland Offshore Wind is a 2.2-gigawatt project, and the motion there landed in a lawsuit brought by the mayor and city council of Ocean City, which opposes it. New England Wind, at 2.6 gigawatts and led by Avangrid, and Revolution Wind, at 700 megawatts and owned equally by Ørsted and Skyborn Renewables, were already the subject of cases filed by the groups ACK For Whales and Green Oceans. The filings are posted as the Maryland motion, the New England Wind motion and the Revolution Wind motion.

The government’s argument is that the Biden-era approvals may have violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and that Interior should be allowed to reassess each one before any court rules on the underlying challenges. In the Maryland filing, Justice Department lawyers pointed to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s own decision documents, which list “moderate adverse” and “major adverse” effects on resources including endangered species, and concluded that the plan “needs to be reconsidered.”

Added up, the three projects represent 5.5 gigawatts of generating capacity on paper, yet only the 700 megawatts at Revolution Wind is operating today. That arithmetic shapes how the motions read. Two of the requests target approvals for projects whose developers have not announced a construction start, while the third reaches a facility with turbines already turning and contracts already signed with utilities in two states.

Revolution Wind and its months of delivered power

Revolution Wind is the awkward case for the government. Its developers announced on March 13 that the project had begun delivering power to New England, and the announcement lists the project at 704 megawatts, with fixed-price, 20-year contracts through utilities in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Ørsted spokesperson Karl-Erik Stromsta told Utility Dive the project had recently finished offshore construction. Ørsted is due to report earnings on November 5, the first scheduled chance for the company to say how the motion changes its plans. At the March launch, Rhode Island Energy president Greg Cornett called first power a truly meaningful step for Rhode Island and the region, and Eversource chief executive Joe Nolan said it arrived at a critical time for the region.

The other two projects sit differently. Neither developer has announced a construction start. In a February filing in the Maryland litigation, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher noted that the developer was not waiting on any federal approval, yet was holding off on next steps because of cost and the risk of losing its investment. A reversal of that plan would land on a project that is paused by choice. Utility Dive does not name the court hearing the two New England cases, so the venues for those requests are unclear from the reporting read for this article.

A permitting bill caught in the middle

The timing collides with Senate talks. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, S. 5653, was unveiled in September and sits in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and sponsor, called the filings a way to blow up a permitting deal, and said amendments would be taken up when the Senate returns in November. The agreement reportedly followed President Trump telling Democratic lawmakers that wind and solar would be treated better in the bill.

Tony Irish, a former Interior associate solicitor now at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said the filings upend what Congress understood the deal to be. He called it outrageous for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to pull generation from the New England grid as winter approaches. He also noted that in March the Endangered Species Committee exempted Gulf oil and gas activities from Endangered Species Act protection.

The motions follow a December stop-work order that paused construction on five offshore wind projects and Interior’s purchases of offshore leases, which are generally paid for only if developers invest an equal sum in U.S. oil, gas or geothermal development. No court has yet ruled on any of the three requests, and the cases have not been consolidated. The department’s position in Utility Dive’s report comes from its court filings rather than from a named spokesperson.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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