Anti-wind energy groups spent the last four years fighting the Biden administration in court to stop renewable energy projects. The Trump administration has inherited those cases — and is using them to carry out the president’s anti-wind crusade.
President Donald Trump has made no secret of his dislike of wind turbines. “They’re ugly, they don’t work, they kill your birds,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting this week. His administration has issued several headline-grabbing stop work orders for wind projects.
More quietly, Trump’s administration is twisting Biden-era legal cases into another pathway to block wind energy development — in ways that often betray the legal facts of the cases, former Department of Justice attorneys and environmental experts say.
“There’s an opportunity, so to speak, for the Trump administration to say, ‘Oh yeah, these lawsuits are super meritorious and we need to totally get rid of these wind projects and the plaintiffs are correct,’ which would be a reversal from defending them, as DOJ has historically done,” a former federal government lawyer who worked on environmental litigation told NOTUS.
This week, the Trump administration filed court documents in a Biden-era court case suggesting that it will revoke key federal approvals issued almost a year ago for U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind project, effectively siding with plaintiffs in the case.
The case was filed in October by the Ocean City, Maryland, city council and mayor against the Interior Department, a month after then-President Joe Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management approved the Maryland Offshore Wind project. The mayor and council alleged in their complaint that the Interior Department violated seven different environmental statues in approving the plan.
The Biden administration’s legal defense suggested that it sought to dismiss the case on procedural grounds.
The new Interior Department filing suggests that the Trump administration is looking to halt development and capitalize on the mayor and council’s arguments that the federal government should have never approved the project.
“The operative complaint in this case challenges, among other things, that approval decision,” the new filing said. “Thus, Federal Defendants are intending to move no later than September 12 to remand and, separately, to vacate BOEM’s COP approval.”
Trump’s administration has inherited several wind-related cases from the Biden administration, most of which were filed by anti-wind nonprofits or residents opposed to wind development in their communities. Those cases largely allege that the federal government violated multiple environmental statutes by allowing wind projects to move forward.
The federal government switching sides as cases are passed down from administration to administration is not unusual, but the tactic has become increasingly common, according to legal experts.
What is unusual is the administration’s suggestions that it will side-switch in a number of wind energy cases despite having a lack of strong legal and environmental arguments for doing so, Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told NOTUS.
“It’s arbitrary and legally baseless,” Eisenson said. “These offshore wind projects have gone through years, in some cases a decade, of environmental review.”
Meanwhile, the former federal government lawyer called the administration’s decision “to vacate an approved wind project which probably was in the works” for years “kind of insane.”
In another Biden-era case, the nonprofit Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow — an anti-wind energy group that disputes the scientific consensus on climate change — argued against a key approval for Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, alleging that the National Marine Fisheries Service did not adequately consider impacts on marine mammals while issuing the approval.
In a joint filing in January immediately after Trump took office, the nonprofit group and the Interior Department signaled that the administration would change its legal strategy.
National Marine Fisheries Service “and BOEM are under new leadership, who require time to become familiar with the issues presented by this litigation and the Presidential Memorandum and to determine how they wish to proceed” the joint filing said, referring to Trump’s January executive order pausing new offshore wind leasing and calling for a review of all existing leases and projects.
The deadline for the federal agencies and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow to jointly decide whether they want to proceed with the case is Sept. 19, according to court documents. The federal government’s tone in its filings in the case have some wind advocates worried that the Virginia project may be ill-fated.
“We really don’t know when and where they’re going to do this,” Eisenson said of the administration revoking approvals for wind projects through pending court cases.
He added that Trump signaled on Day 1 that his administration “may stop defending the federal government’s own permits in court, particularly cases where those permits are already being challenged.”
That means there’s a risk even for projects that are close to finished, Eisenson said — like the Virginia one.
Outside the courts, the Trump administration has launched an all-of-government approach to stunting wind energy development, including by issuing stop-work orders, withdrawing all offshore wind areas, complicating the process for wind energy approvals and taking host of other executive branch actions.
In at least one situation, these executive branch actions closely parallel the administration’s stance in a pending court case. The administration sent a stop-work order to the wind developer Orsted last week for the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut, sparking questions because the project was close to finished and was worth $4 billion.
In the stop-work order, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s acting director, Matthew Giacona, cited national security concerns as the reason Orsted must pause any movement on the project.
“The idea that you would encounter a security concern at this point in the project, when it’s almost already built and there’s been literally more than 10 years of work, is just very suspicious,” the former DOJ environmental lawyer told NOTUS.
Green Oceans, an anti-offshore-wind nonprofit that filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the Interior Department, arguing that the department’s approval of the Revolution Wind Project violated several environmental statutes, released a report in May citing national security and national defense among the primary reasons it believed the federal government had grounds to cancel multiple wind projects in New England, including Revolution Wind.
Green Oceans’ spokesperson did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.
Green Oceans and the Interior Department are aligned on at least some of their arguments against Revolution Wind. The language in Giacona’s letter on national security — including references to federal statues about “the protection of national security interests” and the “prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas” — closely parallels some of the language in Green Oceans’ report.
Green Oceans has used the same report to push the Interior Department to halt development on other wind projects. The group sent the report to top Interior officials in messages about the department’s stop-work order on the Empire Wind project in New York in April, E&E News reported this week.
Federal agencies have repeatedly invoked national security concerns and environmental statutes — techniques that were often used to advance renewable energy development under previous administrations — to stop new developments since Trump took office. The administration has tried to co-opt environmentalists’ arguments to stop projects that its predecessors approved, legal and environmental experts told Grist this month.
Alongside the stop-work order, the administration is also seemingly using the pending lawsuit by Green Oceans as another avenue to ensure the project does not move forward.
Court filings confirm that Green Oceans and the federal government met earlier this summer about the court case and agreed that Green Oceans would no longer move forward with its request that a judge issue a preliminary injunction on the project.
Roger Marzulla, Green Oceans’ lawyer in the case, said in an email to NOTUS that the case “will be affected (and mooted) if BOEM gets the case remanded and vacates its approval of the Project following its review of the record as indicated in the stop-work order.”
Green Oceans in May also filed an amended complaint in the case, after Trump took office. In this complaint, which was shared with NOTUS, the group referenced multiple policy changes made by Trump’s Interior Department, including the agency’s decision to denounce a Biden-era interpretation of a statute that the former administration “relied on as its authority for approving the Revolution Wind project.” Green Oceans incorporated these Trump-era changes into its argument against the wind project.
“The plaintiffs in these cases seem to be taking two tracks now in pursuing their efforts to block the projects, both by continuing litigation in court, but then also lobbying the administration directly to take other executive action to block the projects,” Eisenson said.