The Trump administration is halting an offshore wind mission in New York. Power specialists fear that the U.S. will fall behind different international locations with booming offshore wind, like the UK.
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Christopher Furlong/Getty Pictures/Getty Pictures Europe
U.S. Secretary of the Inside Doug Burgum has ordered a halt to an offshore wind mission close to the coast of Lengthy Island. Right now, Equinor, the Norwegian vitality firm that owns and operates the mission, announced it is complying with the order and suspending all construction.
President Trump, a longtime critic of wind vitality, issued a moratorium on new growth of offshore wind tasks, certainly one of his first executive orders upon returning to the White Home.
However Burgum’s choice escalates the Administration’s opposition to offshore wind as a result of the multi-billion greenback mission in New York already had its federal permits and had damaged floor, says Robert Freudenberg, a vp on the Regional Plan Affiliation, an vitality nonprofit within the New York metropolitan space.
”This actually is subsequent stage offshore wind aggression,” Freudenberg says.
The offshore wind mission, known as Empire Wind 1, was supposed to produce energy to 500,000 homes in New York. The federal lease for the mission was signed in the course of the first Trump administration in 2017. A lot of the federal permitting for this mission occurred in the course of the Biden administration.
In a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the lead federal company for allowing offshore wind tasks, Burgum wrote that “approval for the mission was rushed via by the prior administration with out ample evaluation.”
The letter didn’t give particulars in regards to the alleged rush. The Inside Division didn’t reply to NPR’s request for remark. The concept that the evaluate of this wind mission was rushed just isn’t supported by proof, says Matthew Eisenson, senior fellow at Columbia College’s Sabin Heart for Local weather Change Legislation.
”BOEM spent two and a half years conducting an environmental evaluate. The ultimate product of that environmental evaluate is an environmental influence assertion that is over 3000 pages lengthy, with all of its appendices, and it’s extremely thorough,” Eisenson says. “ This rationale, it’s extremely suspect.”
Trump has usually mentioned, with out proof, that the offshore wind trade kills whales, writing about “the importance of marine life” in his January government order.
Two years in the past after a request from Congressional opponents of wind vitality, the Authorities Accountability Workplace (GAO) started investigating whether or not the offshore wind trade kills whales. On Monday they issued their report. The GAO cites the experience of the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which says it “doesn’t anticipate any demise or severe damage to whales from offshore wind associated actions.”
“So there isn’t any universe wherein the GAO report can be used to substantiate the cease work order for Empire Wind 1,” says Kris Ohleth, government director of the Particular Initiative on Offshore Wind, a wind coverage suppose tank.
The U.S. clean-energy trade is on tempo for record growth this year. Wind vitality makes up about 10% of the U.S. electrical energy combine — the biggest single supply of renewable vitality.
However whereas the offshore wind trade was anticipating to see vital new tasks this yr just like the Vineyard Wind 1 mission in Massachusetts and the Revolution Wind mission in Rhode Island, Ohleth says all offshore wind tasks at the moment are in jeopardy.
“It ought to ship alarm bells, not simply to the offshore wind trade, however to industries past offshore wind,” Freudenberg says, “that the federal authorities might select to cease tasks that had been authorised and are underway at their whim.”
The halting of Empire Wind 1 disrupts a much-needed electrical energy provide to a area with rising energy calls for for issues like knowledge facilities, says Package Kennedy, managing director for energy on the Pure Sources Protection Council. “ That is the form of vitality dominance that the U.S. wants. That the Trump administration must be supporting,” she says.
New York has a aim of creating 9,000 megawatts in offshore wind energy by 2035. That aim is now in danger, Eisenson says. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote in a statement that Burgum’s order stands to threaten 1,000 union employee jobs.
“We can usually consider these tasks as out within the ocean, however the impacts are actually felt in communities,” Freudenberg says.
