Five times in just over a year, the federal government tried to halt America's offshore wind farms. Five times, it lost in court.
These were never just proposals. They are multibillion-dollar projects already years into construction. Revolution Wind alone is a 6.2 billion dollar, 65-turbine project that was already more than three-quarters finished when the government tried to stop it.
Offshore wind developers lease ocean space from the federal government, then spend years securing permits before construction even starts. On January 20, 2025, the president's first day in office, an executive memo directed federal agencies to halt new wind approvals. Seventeen states and Washington, D.C. sued over that memo, arguing it was unlawful. On December 8, 2025, Judge Patti Saris of the District of Massachusetts agreed, granting summary judgment that declared the memo itself unlawful.
On December 22, 2025, the Interior Department suspended all five projects at once, citing national security. No specifics were given.
The five targeted projects were Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind off New York, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut, Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. It was the second stop-work fight of the year for Revolution Wind specifically: an earlier suspension order from August 2025 on the same project had already been overturned in court once before. PBS NewsHour reported the December halt was costing Revolution Wind an estimated 2.3 million dollars a day, with more than a thousand people employed on the project and its specialized installation vessel unavailable again until 2028 if the delay dragged on.
Revolution Wind: roughly 80% complete per PBS NewsHour, with 58 of 65 turbines installed per Canary Media. Sunrise Wind: 45% complete per Electrek. Completion percentages for Empire Wind, Vineyard Wind and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind were not disclosed in the reporting reviewed for this piece.
Judges called the shutdown orders arbitrary and capricious. One by one, every project won an injunction, and construction started up again.
Judge Royce Lamberth ruled first, on January 12, 2026, ordering Revolution Wind's construction to resume, a decision Reuters described as a direct legal setback for the administration. Empire Wind won its own injunction days later, followed by Sunrise Wind on February 2, the fifth and final project to secure court protection, according to Electrek's ongoing tracker. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, marking the Empire Wind ruling in a public statement, said state officials had asked federal officials for evidence of the claimed national security threat and had no answer. Separately, a grassroots group called Green Oceans was allowed to proceed with its own unrelated lawsuit against Revolution Wind on environmental grounds that same month, a reminder that not all opposition to these projects comes from Washington.
Having lost again and again in court, the administration tried something different. It offered to simply buy back developers' ocean leases.
In March 2026, Bloomberg's Jennifer Dlouhy reported that officials had opened talks with offshore wind developers about reimbursing them for leases they had already purchased from the federal government, an expensive and unusual way to unwind projects that had survived every legal challenge so far. Around the same time, a separate Massachusetts-area project had its permit sent back for renewed federal review, a quieter version of the same pressure campaign.
A gavel, held on screen without motion.
Revolution Wind sent its first power to the grid in March. Virginia's project wasn't as lucky. Its finish date slipped a full year, into 2027.
A Dominion Energy executive overseeing Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind said further slowdowns simply don't make sense given the region's soaring electricity demand from AI data centers and shipbuilding, a rare case of a utility publicly pushing back on the cost of the delays.
During a July heat wave, offshore wind helped New England cut its reliance on expensive oil-fired power plants nearly in half. The legal fight isn't over. It just moved to a slower court.
Compared with a similar heat event in 2025, oil's share of the region's peak power supply fell from roughly 15 percent to 10 percent, with total oil-fired generation down 37 percent, aided also by new hydropower imports and expanded rooftop solar. "Offshore wind is a new American energy sector with a big role to play," said Fara Courtney, an offshore wind policy consultant. Each project's underlying lawsuit against the Interior Department is still working its way through the courts, a process that could take years.
Total oil-fired generation in New England was down 37 percent year over year.
Follow the ongoing lawsuits project by project →