Reagan appointee Judge hands climate denier and pedophile Donald Trump, as well as climate denier and pedophile protector Chris Wright, their asses, on another offshore wind case.
This makes for a complete 0-5 shutout of the “war on wind”.
A federal judge on Monday struck down the Interior Department’s order to halt work on a multibillion-dollar wind farm off the coast of New York State, the fifth time the courts have ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to throttle the country’s offshore wind industry. The administration is now 0-5 in its effort to stop wind farms under construction along the East Coast.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction that would allow the developer of the New York project, known as Sunrise Wind, to restart construction while the broader legal battle unfolds.
In December, the Interior Department ordered all work to halt on Sunrise Wind and four other wind farms off the East Coast. To justify the sweeping move, officials cited a classified report by the Defense Department that they said found the projects to be a national security threat.
But Judge Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he was unpersuaded by the government’s claims about national security after reviewing the classified report under seal. He said the actions of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had caused “irreparable harm” to the developer of Sunrise Wind.
“Purportedly new classified information does not constitute a sufficient explanation for the bureau’s decision to entirely stop work on the Sunrise Wind project,” Judge Lamberth said while ruling from the bench after a two-hour court hearing.
Upon learning of the ruling, many energy executives had a feeling of déjà vu. It was the fifth time in the past three weeks that a federal judge had rebuked the Trump administration’s crusade against the five wind farms under construction in federal waters along the East Coast.
The previous four rulings allowed work to continue on Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, Empire Wind off New York, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia and Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts. Judge Lamberth also presided over the case brought by Revolution Wind.
Sunrise Wind is in federal waters about 30 miles east of Montauk Point, N.Y. The project is already 45 percent complete, with 44 out of 84 turbine foundations installed on the ocean floor. Once fully operational, the project is expected to generate enough renewable energy to power nearly 600,000 homes in New York State.
Orsted, the Danish energy giant that is building Sunrise Wind, wrote in court filings that it was losing $2.5 million each day that the project was paused. The company said it had already spent or committed to investing $7 billion in the project so far.
- All five offshore wind farms that had their operations suspended by a stop work order from the Department of the Interior in December have been cleared by federal courts to resume construction, with the fifth wind farm — Ørsted’s 924-MW Sunrise Wind — receiving a preliminary injunction on Monday.
- Like the other impacted developers, Ørsted alleged in court that the government refused to divulge information about the national security risks it cited as the reason for freezing all offshore wind construction. The company said that stopping work on Sunrise Wind was costing it more than $1.25 million per day on the $7 billion project.
- Bryan Stockton, head of federal and regulatory affairs at Ørsted, said in a Jan. 12 statement to the court that as of the signing of his statement, the federal defendants had not “provided or even begun to facilitate [[providing]] Sunrise Wind’s technical experts nor its eligible counsel with access to the information relied upon by [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] or to provide unclassified summaries” of the rationale used for the freeze.
In other news:
Utility Dive:
UPDATE: On Jan. 23, President Donald Trump signed a stack of appropriations bills including the bill containing the Department of Energy’s funding, giving $320 million to DOE’s wind and solar programs under the umbrella of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy – despite his proposed budget calling for zero funding to those programs.
Last November, the Trump administration released an updated organizational chart which eliminated the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, but it has yet to take additional steps to make this move official.