President Trumps ban on wind energy permits unlawful, court rules

President Donald Trump’s ban on issuing new wind energy permits has been ruled “unlawful” by a US court.

In January the president signed an executive order freezing federal approval of pending offshore and onshore wind permits, scrambling plans for many projects in the US that were already under way.

Some 17 states and a New York-based clean energy group sued the government, citing in part the stop-work order imposed on the Empire Wind 1 project, a vast wind farm planned off the coast of New York aimed at powering 500,000 homes.

On Monday, Massachusetts district court judge Patti B Saris vacated Trump’s order, saying it was “arbitrary and capricious and contrary to law”.

In her judgement, Judge Saris said federal agencies had failed to “provide a reasoned explanation for the change” and justification for the new policy, which had put permit approvals on hold while the administration conducted a wider review of approval practices.

She wrote that federal agencies could not simply decline to review applications “altogether, for an unspecified time, pending the completion of a wide-ranging assessment with no anticipated end date”.

New York Attorney General Letitia James described the court’s ruling as “a big victory in our fight to keep tackling the climate crisis” in a social media post.

“We won our lawsuit and stopped the Trump administration from blocking an array of new wind energy projects,” she said.

The states, led by New York, sued in May, after the Interior Department ordered Norway’s Equinor to halt construction on its Empire Wind project.

While the Trump administration has since allowed work on Empire Wind to resume, the states have argued the wider freeze on permits for other projects is hitting the US economy as developers and financiers back away from earlier plans.

The court judgement detailed how Trump’s Wind Order also caused major delays to other key wind projects including Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind in New Jersey, which was expected to bring nearly $2bn in economic benefits but had been either “jeopardized or deferred”, while the SouthCoast Wind project in Massachusetts was postponed delaying thousands of megawatts of clean energy.

Plans for a transmission line in New York that would have connected the city’s power grid to offshore wind farms, saving money over time, were also curtailed.

Timothy Fox, managing director at the Washington, DC-based research firm ClearView Energy Partners, said he did not expect this court ruling to reinvigorate the industry.

“It’s more symbolic than substantive,” he said. “All the court is saying is … you need to go back to work and consider these applications. What does that really mean?” he said.

Officials could still deny permits or bog applications down in lengthy reviews, he noted.

Trump has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels after campaigning for the presidency under the slogan “drill, baby, drill.”

Days after his return to office, Trump said “we’re not going to do the wind thing” and called them “big, ugly windmills” that were dangerous to wildlife.

Trump has previously claimed, without evidence, that wind turbines kill whales.

According to its website, the Empire Wind project is expected to take two years to complete and be fully operational by the end of 2027.

Before becoming president, Trump battled – and ultimately failed – to stop the construction of a wind farm off the coast of his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Reporting contributed by Natalie Sherman