There is a glimmer of hope for the long embattled offshore wind industry.
One project in Massachusetts has been sending power back to the grid for months, even as the Trump administration suspended offshore wind farm construction in December. And this week, another nearly complete project off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island got the green light from a federal judge to continue building.
Monday’s ruling allowing Revolution Wind to resume construction was the first in a series of court cases that businesses and states are bringing over the course of this week, challenging the administration’s December suspension of all five offshore wind projects currently under construction in the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s a big win for power-starved New England, whose regional grid operator says it needs the electrons generated by these wind projects to maintain electricity reliability in the region for years to come.
President Donald Trump, however, continues to double down on his distaste for offshore wind.
“My goal is to not let any windmill be built; they’re losers,” Trump said on Friday, during a meeting with oil CEOs. “We don’t approve, and I told my people, we will not approve windmills.”
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on Monday’s ruling.
Trump’s stance has resulted in the administration blocking projects that are nearly finished. In Monday’s court arguments, representatives for Revolution Wind said the 704-megawatt wind farm was 87% complete. Construction had already been stopped once before by the administration, in August.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts wind farm Vineyard Wind is also mostly complete and operational. That project has been allowed to send power to the grid even amid Trump’s suspension, a spokesperson for regional grid operator ISO-New England told CNN in an email.
Offshore wind has long been sought by New England and mid-Atlantic states, which rely mostly on natural gas for electricity and heating — and are lacking other ready energy infrastructure. At Monday’s court hearing, representatives for Revolution Wind said their wind farm was the only project of such size ready to come online and start providing power to New England’s grid soon. It’s ultimately expected to generate enough electricity to power upwards of 350,000 homes. When complete, the slightly smaller Vineyard Wind project is expected to power around 200,000 homes.
The largest wind farm impacted by the December order is a sprawling Virginia project that could eventually be the largest in the nation. Set to be completed by the end of this year, it would supply electricity to the region with the world’s largest cluster of power-hungry data centers.
Residential customers in the mid-Atlantic region, including Virginia, desperately need more energy to service the skyrocketing demand from data centers — and many are seeing spiking energy bills while they wait for new power to be brought online. In a notable move, that region’s grid operator PJM Interconnection joined a lawsuit on behalf of the Virginia project, calling its 2.7 gigawatts an “integral component” of electricity generation in the region.
“Extended delay of construction and operation of the CVOW [Virginia] project will cause irreparable harm to the 67 million Americans served by PJM,” PJM wrote in a legal brief.
The Revolution and Vineyard wind farms are “particularly important” to meeting New England’s winter energy needs, energy experts and the regional grid operator ISO-NE say. In a December statement, ISO-NE said the projects were important to maintaining “system reliability in the winter when offshore wind output is highest and other forms of fuel supply are constrained.”
“Canceling or delaying these projects will increase costs and risks to reliability in our region,” the regional grid operator added in a statement.
New England’s winter energy woes are driven both by temperature and the fact that this region is the last stop on the nation’s natural gas pipeline system. Competing needs for electricity and home heating can send energy prices for consumers surging.
“The colder it gets on a given day, the more demands that are placed on the gas pipeline system, not just to generate electric power, but to heat people’s homes,” said Francis Pullaro, president of RENEW Northeast, a clean energy industry association based in New England. “If there’s less demand for something, you’ll lower the price.”
There’s another way offshore wind will have downward pressure on prices, Pullaro said. The regional grid operator typically directs the cheapest units to run first, which means wind — which carries no cost for fuel — will be called on more, as more facilities get up and running.
Wind and solar “have very little marginal cost; they essentially bid zero,” Pullaro said. “The more wind you have on the system, and when it’s running at these peak times, it essentially means you’re not having to turn on that peaker gas or oil unit, because it’s just not needed.”
Pullaro’s organization commissioned a recent study that found that having 3.5 gigawatts of offshore wind on New England’s grid last winter would have resulted in New England utility Eversource’s residential customers saving between $15.83 – $32.13 total in electric bills over the course of a three-month winter period.
However, if Revolution and Vineyard wind are both built, they will add less than half of that amount of wind energy to the grid, and there’s no publicly available data yet to show how offshore wind has impacted electricity prices in the region this winter.
Trump administration officials have frequently claimed that offshore wind is the most expensive form of energy. On Monday, Interior Sec. Doug Burgum repeated that, calling the form of energy “some of the most expensive projects ever conceived.”
Offshore wind projects do have high initial costs, in large part because the limited supply chains and high inflation rates that have dogged the US economy affect construction. But, once built, projects like Vineyard are in such demand that they will begin operation with the electricity they generate already spoken for — and paid for. The high cost of building an offshore wind farm is offset by its ability to generate inexpensive electricity.
And state officials have warned that without this wind energy on the grid, the lack of available energy will only force prices higher. Without Revolution Wind, consumers in Connecticut could pay a lot more for energy during times of high demand — as much as $200 million annually starting next year, the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection estimated in a recent report.
This week, massive wind turbine blades, towers and other components could be seen sitting at the Connecticut State Pier in New London — waiting to be taken out to sea and constructed.
