Back
One sign read “Let the Wind Power Our Future.” Others displayed nothing more than the giant gold seal of America’s largest electrical workers union. These logos and slogans stood out among the 100 or so people crowded on top of the marble steps of the Nassau County Executive and Legislative Building in New York on Tuesday, as they called for the right to continue building offshore wind turbines near the Long Island coast.
That right had just been revoked.
On April 16, the Trump administration issued a stop-work order that paused the construction of Empire Wind 1. The 810-megawatt wind farm was two weeks into at-sea construction. It’s also the anchor project of an in-progress effort to build an offshore wind staging terminal in South Brooklyn, which has been celebrated as a major economic win for the local, mainly working-class community.
“It was time to demonstrate the diverse support for offshore wind,” said Adrienne Esposito, rally organizer and executive director of the nonprofit group Citizens Campaign for the Environment. She said the group includes retirees, union workers, young people in job training, a charter boat captain, and a whale expert.
They’re emblematic of the broad array of stakeholders who stand to lose from President Donald Trump’s ongoing war on offshore wind, which started with a pause on new permitting and has in recent weeks escalated to attacks on projects already underway. These projects are central to the climate goals of many East Coast states, the economic development plans of neighborhoods and towns, and public health concerns of those who have lived for decades in the shadow of dirtier, air-polluting industries.
Empire Wind 1 is a critical component of New York’s strategy to address climate change and achieve a 70% renewable energy share by 2030. It’s the largest energy infrastructure project the state has undertaken in the last 50 years, according to a top state official who lambasted the Trump administration’s stop-work order as doing “irrefutable harm.”
“This project underwent extensive and robust federal reviews … and is already under construction with strong support from the local Sunset Park community and more than 1,500 construction workers currently employed,” Doreen Harris, president of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said in a statement last week.
Since early April, vessels had been laying rocks roughly 20 miles offshore from New York City in preparation for attaching 54 wind towers to the seafloor in May. The project was supposed to go online in 2027. All at-sea work is now halted.
The Trump administration’s order didn’t impact the massive terminal being built along a Brooklyn waterfront to support the installation. About 1,500 people have been constructing the 73-acre offshore wind hub since June. But local supporters now worry what the order means for all the green jobs promised by the Empire Wind project.
“Offshore wind, if done properly, gave us a real shot at creating economic opportunities for a neighborhood and region that has carried the weight of environmental racism for too long. It meant good jobs and local investment for our local residents,” Elizabeth Yeampierre wrote in a statement issued Tuesday, the same day as the rally. She is executive director of the grassroots nonprofit organization, UPROSE, and a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.
For the past decade, Yeampierre has led efforts in her community to advocate for redevelopment of Sunset Park’s industrialized waterfront, a stretch of which has sat vacant since the 1990s. At one point, city officials considered plans to rezone the area for apartments and retail shops. Yeampierre pushed officials instead towards plans to rebuild a “working” waterfront that would generate jobs and place Sunset Park residents at the center of the energy transition.
That vision, the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, is becoming a reality. The offshore wind hub, once completed by the end of 2026 if it’s not interrupted, will be used for storing and assembling wind turbines. Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant building Empire Wind, was planning to use it as a staging ground for not just Empire Wind but for a sprawling array of already-approved wind projects being built across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic by various developers.
The previous administration gave some level of approval to nearly a dozen offshore wind farms. But only nine projects, including Empire Wind, managed to get all of their permits before Trump took office. Another one of those approved projects — Atlantic Shores in New Jersey — has already been shelved, thanks in part to the Trump administration’s decision to claw back a previously issued Clean Air Act permit.
A spokesman for Equinor told Canary Media, “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.” He said the company is engaging directly with the Department of the Interior to “understand the questions” raised about its federal permits, which were issued in 2024.
Equinor signed its federal lease for Empire Wind during the first Trump administration in 2017. Its project took over eight years to go from proposal to full approval, though President Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversees the core offshore wind permitting process, recently suggested in a post on X that “the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
That leaves Sunset Park community members to wonder what’s next.
“Unfortunately, that door of what is beautifully possible and necessary is being shut on our knuckles,” wrote Yeampierre in response to Trump’s interference.
Offshore wind promises cleaner and more reliable energy for New York and the East Coast. But for residents of Sunset Park in particular, these projects — and the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal that relies on them — offer benefits beyond that.
What’s also at stake is a real shot to revive Sunset Park, a mainly working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino, and immigrant communities. Equinor has already given $5 million in grants to help local community groups, like UPROSE, build education and job-training programs around a new wind-power economy.
Maintaining Sunset Park’s industrial character is key to keeping housing affordable in the area, Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, told Canary Media in 2022. Many envision Sunset Park as a place where people have job training and good salaries without the air pollution that spewed from the port during its 20th century heyday.
“We were building a whole industry … and the problem with shutting down the project is that it really sends a signal to the developers in the market — like, what certainty is there?” said Lara Skinner, executive director of the Climate Jobs Institute at Cornell University’s New York City campus.
She fears that developers like Equinor may pull out, not for lack of commitment, but for lack of certainty that Trump will honor the federal government’s permits and approvals. And if the offshore wind turbines don’t get installed, she said, the wind hub in Sunset Park is in jeopardy.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has expressed similar fears about the stop-work order and vowed last week to “fight this every step of the way.”
Meanwhile, some local Republican officials are pleased. Speaking at a press conference last week, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman sided with the Trump administration’s view that Biden-era permitting was insufficient: “We think there [were] shortcuts. We think there was false information. And a lack of public input.”
Esposito, the organizer of Tuesday’s rally, said politics should not be part of the Empire Wind debate.
“Look, offshore wind is not a Republican issue and not a Democratic issue,” said Esposito, who noted the threats of a warming planet and rising seas. “At the end of the day, we all live on an island.”
.svg)
