The Trump administration is looking to reconsider a key permit for SouthCoast Wind, a planned 141-turbine project off the Massachusetts coast.
The move comes a week after it revoked the same permit for a proposed wind farm near Maryland, and several weeks after it issued a stop-worker order for the nearly-completed Revolution Wind project near Rhode Island. It represents the latest action the Trump administration has taken to halt offshore wind projects in the U.S.
On Thursday, the government filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. to take back its approval of the SouthCoast Wind project’s “construction and operations plan,” or COP. The COP is the last major federal permit an offshore wind project needs before it can start putting turbines in the water.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had approved SouthCoast’s COP on Jan. 17, 2025, three days before President Trump’s second term began.
“Based on its review to date, BOEM has determined that the COP approval may not have fully complied with the law regulating the use of federal waters over the outer continental shelf,” the government wrote. “That is reason enough to grant a remand.”
In a statement, SouthCoast Wind said the company “intends to vigorously defend our permits in federal court.”
The project took four years to get permitted, and “reflected an extensive public process that incorporated feedback from federal and state government agencies, commercial ocean users, Tribal Nations and many other stakeholders,” the company’s statement continued. “Stable permitting for American infrastructure projects should be of top concern for anyone who wants to see continued investment in the United States.”
In a earlier filing in the case, SouthCoast Wind CEO Michael Brown said the company has already invested more than $6 million in the project.
“When making these investment decisions, SouthCoast Wind understandably expected that the federal government would follow valid statutes and regulations setting out criteria for issuance of permits,” Brown wrote.
Gov. Maura Healey said Thursday that Massachusetts is counting on offshore wind to provide a critical source of electricity in the coming decades.
“New England needs this power, to lower costs and for reliability,” Healey said in a statement. “There is absolutely no need for the Trump Administration to reopen permitting processes and deny jobs, investment and energy power to the states.”
SouthCoast Wind is a 2,400 megawatt project slated to be built in federal waters about 23 miles south of Nantucket and 60 miles east of Rhode Island. It’s being developed in two phases: the first, SouthCoast Wind 1, is expected to generate just over 1,000 megawatts for Massachusetts and 200 megawatts for Rhode Island, though the states have yet to finalize those contracts. The second, SouthCoast Wind 2, is still in development and the company hasn’t yet bid it in any state auctions.
All told, the projects could generate enough electricity to power about 1.4 million homes in the region.
Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, called the government’s rationale for remanding the permit specious and shallow. She said the Trump administration is relying on a new interpretation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which requires the Secretary of the Department of Interior to weigh several factors before granting companies permission to use federal waters for energy development.
In May, the Interior Department overturned guidance from 2021 about how the agency should interpret the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and directed all bureaus and offices within the agency to reevaluate permits issued under the old guidance.
“ You can’t just say, ‘We’ve decided we might want to interpret the law in a different way, and so therefore you should let us take a new look at [permits],’ ” Sinding Daly said. “That’s not what the law requires. You’ve got to have a much more expansive explanation as to why what your predecessors did is not in accordance with the law.”
It is now up to a judge to decide whether the federal government can take back SouthCoast Wind’s final permit and reevaluate it.
While the administration has used a moratorium on permitting to target wind projects in early stages of development, and it’s used stop-work orders to target those under construction, SouthCoast Wind is part of a small group of projects that fall somewhere in between. These projects, which also include US Wind near Maryland and New England Wind near Massachusetts, have all of their major federal permits, but either haven’t started construction yet, or are missing a few smaller federal or state environmental permits.
To hamper these three projects, Timothy Fox, vice president of energy research firm ClearView Energy Partners, said the administration appears to be using a different strategy — one that involves the courts.
All three are the subject of ongoing federal litigation brought by local communities or anti-wind groups. Normally, the federal government would take the position of defending a project it permitted, Fox said, but that’s not what it’s doing now.
In the case of SouthCoast Wind, the town of Nantucket sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in March in an attempt to stop the project. The town alleged that the agency failed to comply with federal environmental and historical preservation laws when it issued the project’s construction and operation permit.
Instead of defending the project’s approval, Fox said the Trump administration is effectively saying, “we agree with one or several of the claims brought by the challengers and we want to voluntary remand the permit.”
SouthCoast Wind, an intervenor in the lawsuit, can file an appeal. But Fox said it’s hard to envision a scenario where the judge doesn’t side with the government.
“When it comes to offshore wind, the sitting administration has a lot of authority,” he said.
SouthCoast Wind isn’t the only Massachusetts wind project in jeopardy. Several wind advocates have said they’re bracing for the administration to issue a stop-work order for Vineyard Wind, the 62-turbine project currently being built near Martha’s Vineyard. Next month, the government has said it plans to remand the construction and operations plan for New England Wind, a project about 20 miles south of Nantucket.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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