President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) announced on Monday that it is pausing leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects off the East Coast.
“Due to national security concerns identified by @DeptofWar, @interior is PAUSING leases for 5 expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized offshore wind farms,” DOI Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X. “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED.”
President Trump “is bringing common sense back to energy policy and putting security first,” Burgum added.
In a separate news release, the DOI stated that the pause was also connected with “national security risks” identified by the Department of War in “recently completed classified reports,” according to reporting by Fox News.
According to the news outlet:
The department highlighted unclassified reports from the U.S. government in the past that have “long found” that massive turbine blades in large-scale offshore wind projects can create radar interference called “clutter” that can obscure legitimate moving targets and generate false targets.
In 2024, a Department of Energy report found that while the radar threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some of that “clutter,” the radar can “miss actual targets” when that threshold is increased.
However, on Monday the New York Times called the pause “a major escalation of President Trump’s crusade against offshore wind power.”
According to the Times:
President Trump has repeatedly called offshore wind turbines ugly, costly and inefficient. The Interior Department’s decision could effectively prevent the continued construction or operation of the projects, jeopardizing billions of dollars that have already been invested.
The five projects affected are Vineyard Wind 1 off of Massachusetts,
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind off New York, and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The developers of the five projects, including the Danish energy giant Orsted, did not immediately respond to requests for comment to Fox News.
The Vineyard offshore farm is “currently under construction and partially operational,” the Times also reported, “with about half of the project’s 62 turbines sending power to the electric grid as of October.
As Breitbart News reported back in the summer of 2023, the Biden administration went full speed ahead on approving offshore wind farms in the Atlantic despite protests from residents and calls for their impact on the environment, navigation, and military operations to be studied first.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
