Posted on September 29, 2025
The U.S. Justice department intervened Sept. 27 in a lawsuit brought by New Jersey opponents of offshore wind power, with a motion asking the federal court to remand previous approvals for the already-stalled Atlantic Shores project.
“This filing means federal agencies are going back to the drawing board,” said Bob Stern, president of the local activist group Save LBI, in an email to supporters Saturday. The group, a coalition of seaside homeowners, businesses and commercial fishermen, had filed their lawsuit July 11 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and has won allies in the Trump administration’s drive to shut down offshore wind development.
Earlier this year Save LBI successfully petitioned the administration and federal Environmental Protection Agency to suspend the Clean Air Act permit issued for Atlantic Shores construction. The latest move in the group’s larger federal lawsuit would completely reverse the construction and operations plan and record of decision issued by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management a year ago, among a flurry of wind power plans approved in the last year of the Biden administration.
“This is a significant admission by the federal agencies that the Atlantic Shores approvals cannot withstand legal scrutiny in their current form,” said Thomas Stavola Jr., a lawyer for Save LBI. Over years of local organizing and fundraising the activists mounted what they call “a comprehensive, multi-statute challenge to the Atlantic Shores project, citing data deficiencies, injurious impacts to marine mammals, tourism, economy, and electric rates and failures to assess cumulative impacts across the broader offshore wind buildout.”
Atlantic Shores, a joint venture of EDF Renewables and Shell, had been planned as 197 turbines as close as 8.7 miles off Long Beach Island, in an array rated for potential power up to 2,800 megawatts. The proposal faced fierce resistance from residents of beachfront communities who feared effects on tourism and property values, commercial fishermen and some environmental activists resisting what they see as a future industrialization of waters in the New York Bight.
Like another ill-fated New Jersey project, Ørsted’s Ocean Wind, Atlantic Shore’s financial prospects deteriorated with global inflation following the covid-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and supply chain problems. Atlantic Shores’ backers had hope to submit an updated bid for future power production to New Jersey energy planners, but in June asked the state Board of Public Utilities to cancel its original bid.
Partner Shell withdrew from the venture and wrote down a $1 billion loss on U.S. offshore wind investment after the Trump administration moved aggressively against the industry. Those attacks continue, with mixed results. A federal court allowed Ørsted to resume construction on its Revolution Wind project off southern New England, already almost 80 percent complete when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a temporary stop-work order.
An earlier administration order to shutter the 810-MW Empire Wind project off New York was reversed in mid-May after negotiations between the Trump administration and state officials. With mounting energy demands from coastal urban areas and new data centers, offshore wind advocates still insist there can still be a future for U.S. offshore wind.
Meanwhile wind power opponents keep pressuring the Trump administration to do even more to foreclose on surviving projects.
In a Sept. 25 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-NJ, argued that wind projects pose “long-term effects and impacts…on nationalsecurity and the radar used for marine vessels and military and commercial aircraft.”
Van Drew singled out Equinor’s Empire Wind project, reportedly reprieved after Tump administration and New York State officials agreed to reconsider proposed natural gas pipeline links to supply Northeast states.
Interior Secretary “Doug Burgum and his team at the Department of Interior have already identified significant insufficiencies in several projects approved underthe prior administrations,” Van Drew wrote.
He asserted “the prior administration also downplayed the threats to our national security posed by the large scale offshore wind industrialization including radar used for missile defense, air traffic, marine traffic, as well as sonar impacts from electromagnetic interference, the impact on training grounds off the northeast coast, and potential hazards posed by these structures during a time of conflict.”
