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After eight years of planning and amid the Trump administration’s all-out assault on the sector, an offshore wind project outside of New York City quietly began at-sea construction this month.
Developer Equinor issued no press releases, held no ceremonies, and failed to respond to multiple inquiries about the construction milestone for its Empire Wind 1 project. Instead, a Listserv catering to boat captains and local residents posted a March 24 notice that “rock installation” around the turbines’ underwater bases would begin in April. Multiple insiders told Canary Media that work is now underway on those bases, which will minimize erosion around the first-ever wind turbines to connect to New York City’s power grid.
The lack of fanfare around an 810-megawatt wind farm effectively breaking ground less than 20 miles from America’s largest city speaks to the seismic shifts in messaging by renewable energy companies under Trump 2.0. While some firms are testing new lobbying strategies, others are choosing silence.
“There’s a bit of hesitancy to be out in front,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of Turn Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for U.S. offshore-wind businesses and sector growth. “It’s about not wanting to stick their heads up and drawing more attention, potentially, from the administration, which is already giving quite a bit of attention to offshore wind.”
President Donald Trump, more accurately, has put a bullseye on the industry’s back.
The president has called wind power “garbage,” “horrendous,” and “bullshit.” On the campaign trail, he made “windmills” a frequent focus of stump speeches and social media tirades. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Trump said “no new windmills” would be built in the U.S. during his presidency. Days later he reposted a video on Truth Social that contained misleading information about the scale of environmental damage from last year’s wind turbine failure at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts.
Trump then issued an executive order on Inauguration Day that effectively froze all offshore wind permitting and leasing pending a federal review. Seemingly safe from the president’s pause at the time were nine projects, including Empire Wind 1, that already had their federal permits in hand. Since then, at least one of those permitted projects — the 2.8-gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the New Jersey coast — has fallen apart. Others, like Dominion Energy’s 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, have pressed on.
With rock installation underway, Empire Wind has taken the first step toward erecting the project’s 54 turbines. On Monday, Equinor sent out another construction “update” email, this time about round-the-clock “[remotely operated vehicle] and dive operations” in the lease area this April, meaning underwater robots and human divers are also at work.
Both at-sea construction notices went out to subscribers of a public Listserv and have since been posted to the project’s “Community Updates” webpage. But Equinor, a Norwegian energy giant, did not update Empire Wind’s homepage to tout the news. Its Facebook page is now deactivated. The project’s X account made its most recent post in November. Equinor has not issued a single press release about Empire Wind 1 since Trump took office.
Empire Wind 1 is slated to finish construction by 2027, and when it does it will power 500,000 New York homes, according to the project’s website. It will also play an integral role in helping the state achieve its legislatively mandated target of 70% renewable energy by 2030.
But Bright said she isn’t surprised that the company is avoiding the spotlight right now.
An army of conservative think tanks are lobbying for a stop-work order on all U.S. offshore wind under construction, citing debunked claims that wind farms harm whales.
Empire Wind’s quiet kickoff this month caught the attention of U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime offshore wind opponent. In late March he penned a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in response to the “alarming development” of the project’s at-sea work and advised Burgum to “block construction” of Empire Wind using “everything in your power.” Smith cited the president’s anti-wind memorandum alongside other claims, which lacked specifics, that Empire Wind could “blind” military radar or break apart during hurricanes.
Smith also claimed in his letter to Burgum that something similar to last year’s cargo ship collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge could happen to one of Empire Wind’s turbines, writing “such a situation is more likely than many may think.” The fatal bridge collision occurred inside one of the Port of Baltimore’s designated shipping channels. While Empire Wind’s lease area is sandwiched between two shipping lanes, early concerns about ship collisions in the New York Bight were dismissed after years of independent studies, government research, and computer simulations.
There’s no indication that the Interior Department has intervened in Empire Wind’s scheduled construction — yet.
In fact, agency officials are likely in close contact with Empire Wind’s developers, as is typical with all construction in federal waters. If Empire Wind 1 can avoid weather delays and political interference, the first steel monopile — the subsea part of a wind tower — could be driven into the seafloor as early as May. Undersea cable laying is scheduled for June, according to sources familiar with the project.
Plus, with rising energy demands and some of these multi-billion-dollar wind projects nearly complete, some Republicans see abandonment as a risky move.
While the start of offshore work is a symbolic milestone, Empire Wind’s onshore construction is also ramping up.
Empire Wind’s Monday update email said the roof of the project’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal facility is nearing completion. According to the notice, excavation is underway at the spot where a future Brooklyn-based substation will connect wind-generated electricity to the city’s grid.
Research to monitor ecosystem impacts from this massive project is also progressing.
In late March, Duke University professor Doug Nowacek told Canary Media that he and his team of researchers were still planning to tag whales in the project’s lease area during the last week of April. The tagging is meant to take place just before pile-driving into the seafloor begins in early May, he explained.
“This is a unique opportunity to gather data on whale movements in the area both before and after a wind project is built,” said Nowacek, whose multi-year research on the effects of wind projects on marine animals is funded by a Department of Energy grant. As of late March, Nowacek said that research was going forward despite headwinds in Washington.
Meanwhile, as the weather warms, marking the start of a new construction season, “things are moving forward” for the four other U.S. offshore wind projects that are underway, said Bright of Turn Forward.
In addition to Empire Wind, the other commercial-scale projects actively under construction are Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Massachusetts’ Vineyard Wind 1, New York’s Sunrise Wind, and Revolution Wind, which is shared between Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The steady progress of some wind projects under Trump’s anti-wind order is noteworthy but not entirely unexpected.
Presidential executive orders are not “self-executing,” according to Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Squillace said they are akin to a memo penned to another leader, which in this case is the Secretary of the Interior.
Before entering Trump’s orbit, Secretary Burgum was a friend to wind energy as governor of North Dakota, a state that gets more than one-third of its power from onshore wind. He indicated at his Senate confirmation hearing in January that he would allow fully permitted offshore wind projects “to continue” even under political pressure to halt them.
Since his confirmation, Burgum has made negative comments about offshore wind — calling it “expensive” and “unreliable” on the social media site X — but he’s not yet moved to pull the plug on large-scale energy projects in the middle of construction. Burgum is also operating against the backdrop of an unprecedented surge in power demand, in large part from data centers. Construction of new gas plants can’t keep up; the U.S. needs all the power it can get.
In countries like the U.K., offshore wind is already increasing grid reliability while delivering affordable energy.
In fact, while Equinor keeps its head down in America, the company is celebrating ongoing successes in Britain’s offshore wind sector, which the U.K. government calls “the backbone” of its clean power system. Equinor already runs three of Britain’s operational offshore projects and is one of four developers currently building Dogger Bank, the 277-turbine North Sea project that will soon surpass Orsted’s Hornsea 2 as the world’s largest wind farm.
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