The Trump administration interrupts an offshore wind project in New York. Energy experts fear that the United States will be delayed on other countries with a booming offshore wind, such as the United Kingdom.
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images / Getty Images Europe
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Christopher Furlong / Getty Images / Getty Images Europe
Interior secretary Doug Burgum has interrupted an offshore wind project near the Côte de Long Island. Today, Equinor, the Norwegian Energy Company which owns and operates the project, announced that it was in accordance with order and will suspect the entire construction.
President Trump, a long -standing critic of wind energy, published a moratorium on the new development of offshore wind projects, one of his first decrees on his return to the White House.
But Burgum’s decision increases the opposition of the offshore wind administration because the project of several billion dollars in New York has already had its federal permits and had sat, said Robert Freudenberg, vice-president of the region of the regional plan, a non-profit energy in the Metropolitan region of New York.
“This is really the attack on offshore wind on the next level,” explains Freudenberg.
The offshore wind project, called Wind 1 Empire, was supposed to provide power to 500,000 houses in New York. The federal lease of the project was signed during the first Trump administration in 2017.
In a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the main federal agency to allow offshore wind projects, Burgum wrote that “the project approval was precipitated by the previous administration without sufficient analysis”.
The letter did not give details on the presumed precipitation. The interior department did not respond to the request for NPR comments. The idea that the examination of this wind project was precipitated is not supported by evidence, explains Matthew Eisenson, principal researcher at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law of Columbia University.
“Boem spent two and a half years of an environmental review. The final product of this environmental review is a declaration of environmental impact which makes more than 3000 pages, with all its annexes, and it is very in -depth,” explains EISENSON. “This logic is very suspect.”
Trump has often said, without evidence, that the offshore wind industry kills the whales, writing on “the importance of marine life” in his January decree.
Two years ago, after a request for opponents of the Wind Energy Congress, the Government of Responsibility (GAO) began to investigate to find out if the offshore wind industry kills the whales. On Monday, they published their report. The GAO quotes the expertise of the national ocean and atmospheric administration which says that it “does not provide any death or serious injury to the whales of the offshore wind actions”.
“There is therefore no universe in which the GAO report would be used to support the Stop Work Order for Empire Wind 1”, explains Kris Ohleth, executive director of the Special Initiative on Wind offshore, a thinking group on wind policy.
The American clean energy industry is on the pace of record growth this year. Wind energy represents around 10% of the American electricity mixture – the largest source of renewable energy.
But while the offshore wind industry expected to see new important projects this year such as the Vineyard Wind 1 project in Massachusetts and the Wind Project Revolution in Rhode Island, Ohleth says that all offshore wind projects are now in danger.
“It should send alarm ringtses, not only to the offshore wind industry, but also to industries beyond the offshore wind,” said Freudenberg, “that the federal government could choose to stop projects that had been approved and are underway.”
The end of the Wind 1 Empire disrupts an electricity offer essential to a region with increasing power requests for things like data centers, explains Kit Kennedy, director general of power at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is the kind of energy domination that the United States needs. That the Trump administration should support,” she said.
New York aims to develop 9,000 megawatts in offshore wind energy by 2035. This goal is now at risk, says Eisenson. New York Governor Kathy Hochul wrote in a statement that the Burgum order was to threaten 1,000 jobs for union workers.
“We can often think of these projects as in the ocean, but the impacts are really felt in communities,” explains Freudenberg.
