By Nichola Groom (Reuters) -The Trump administration’s order to halt work on a nearly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island threatens grid reliability and jobs and defies explanation, business and government leaders from New England said on Monday. State leaders in Connecticut and Rhode Island demanded details from the administration about why […]
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US halt of wind project defies explanation, New England officials say
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By Nichola Groom
(Reuters) -The Trump administration’s order to halt work on a nearly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island threatens grid reliability and jobs and defies explanation, business and government leaders from New England said on Monday.
State leaders in Connecticut and Rhode Island demanded details from the administration about why it issued a stop-work order to the Revolution Wind project late on Friday. In its letter to project developer Orsted , the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management cited unspecified national security concerns.
“They say there are national security interests here. Come clean, reveal them,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said at a press conference with fellow state leaders on Monday. “And if you can’t do it in public, give us a briefing in private. We have top secret clearance.”
A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees BOEM, declined to comment on the stop-work order.
ISO New England, which operates the grid in six states, and North America’s Building Trades Unions, an alliance of building and construction unions, also raised concerns.
“The ISO is expecting this project to come online and it is included in our analyses of near-term and future grid reliability,” the grid operator for 15 million people said. “Delaying the project will increase risks to reliability.”
NABTU said the order affected the jobs of 1,000 members.
“A ‘stop-work order’ is the fancy bureaucratic term, but it means one thing: throwing skilled American workers off the job after they’ve spent a decade training, building, and delivering,” NABTU President Sean McGarvey said in a statement.
Revolution Wind was scheduled to be completed next year and produce enough electricity to power 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Shares of Orsted, which is based in Denmark, sank to record lows on Monday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has repeatedly criticized wind energy as ugly, unreliable and expensive. His administration has taken steps to rein in wind development, including launching a national security investigation into imports of wind turbines and components.
Green Oceans, a Rhode Island group that opposes the project due to concerns about its impact on coastal communities and ocean habitats, said it was pleased with the order.
“This decisive action demonstrates that the federal government finally recognizes the seriously flawed permitting process that allowed this project and others to move forward,” the group said.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles and Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Nia Williams)