The Trump administration is no fan of renewable energy, but it reserves special ire for wind power. Trump himself has repeatedly made false statements about the cost of wind power, its use around the world, and its environmental impacts. That animosity was paired with an executive order that blocked all permitting for offshore wind and some land-based projects, an order that has since been thrown out by a court that ruled it arbitrary and capricious.
Not content to block all future developments, the administration has also gone after the five offshore wind projects currently under construction. After temporarily blocking two of them for reasons that were never fully elaborated, the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk.
The response to that late-December announcement has been uniform: The companies building each of the projects sued the administration. As of Monday, every single one of them has achieved the same result: a temporary injunction that allows them to continue construction. This, despite the fact that the suits were filed in three different courts and heard by four different judges.
Based on reporting elsewhere, some of the judges viewed the classified report that was used to justify the order to halt construction, but didn’t find it persuasive. And, in one of the cases, the judge noted that the government itself wasn’t acting as if the security risks were real. The threat supposedly comes from the operation of the wind turbines, but the Department of the Interior’s order blocked construction while allowing any completed hardware to operate.
