Danish Firm Ørsted Sues To Save US Offshore Wind Jobs

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Oh the irony, it burns. So brightly. Among the thousands of workers in the US wind industry are a fair number of Trump voters, who are out of a job now that their own Commander-in-Chief has brought almost the entire US offshore wind industry to a screeching halt. Not to worry. The Danish firm Ørsted is determined to revive one of Trump’s victims, the 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.

Offshore Wind Workers Want Their Jobs Back

US President Donald Trump swept into office on the strength of many campaign promises, one of which was to obliterate the US offshore wind industry. That was, or should have been, a known fact to workers in the offshore wind industry, including those buzzing about the Revolution Wind worksites. By Election Day 2024 the project was well underway, with more than 1,000 unionized Trump voters and non-voters alike working at the site and onshore, along with dozens of fishing boat owners recruited through the cooperative organization Sea Services North America to help ferry work crews around.

Apparently some of them missed the memo about Trump killing off their jobs. While the precise number of offshore wind workers who voted for Trump on Election Day 2024 will remain a mystery, the anecdotal evidence indicates it was more than a few.

The Sea Services operation, for example, halted on August 22 along with the other jobs when the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued the stop-work order. In an op-ed posted by the Hartford Courant on September 5, Sea Services founder and career commercial fisherman Gary Yerman made a strong worker-centric plea for withdrawing the stop-work order.

In the piece, Yerman indicated that Trump won the votes of most, if not all, of his fellow Sea Services members:

President Trump has spent a career in the private sector building things. I can’t think of one guy who isn’t a Trumper in our co-op. We’re blue-collar guys (and some gals too) who get up before dawn, work with our hands, and we trusted him to look out for us. The truth is, we love President Trump.

“We don’t want a new career path, but this side income has been critical for families just trying to get by when fishing is lean,” Yerman added. “That’s why the Department of Interior’s decision to stop work on Revolution Wind is so disappointing.”

State Attorneys General Go To Court For Offshore Wind Jobs

“Most of us are Trump voters, and we still believe in a leader who builds. That’s why we’re asking President Trump to reverse the stop-work order issued to Revolution Wind by Interior,” Yerman added again for good measure.

Good luck with that. Everyone who was working on the offshore wind project has been cooling their heels around the kitchen table for almost two weeks, with no sign that the Trump administration intends to let the wheels go back in motion again.

The Attorneys General of Connecticut and Rhode Island are not waiting around to see if the “pretty please” approach packs any punch. On September 4, they announced their intent to go to court and force the Trump administration to withdraw the stop-work order.

“The August 22 stop work order issued by the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) did not identify any violation of law or imminent threat to safety. The order abstractly cites BOEM’s authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA), ordering the stop so that the agency may address unidentified ‘concerns.’ No explanation was provided,” the two AGs emphasized.

Now Here Comes Ørsted

Well, there are a couple of possible explanations and both begin with the letter G: gas pipelines and Greenland.

If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread. Meanwhile, Ørsted has also leaped into action. “Today, Revolution Wind, a joint venture between Ørsted and a consortium led by Skyborn Renewables (a Global Infrastructure Partners platform company), filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging the stop-work order from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), to be followed by a request for a Preliminary Injunction,” Ørsted announced on September 4.

To make a long legal story short, Revolution Wind agrees with the Rhode Island and Connecticut AGs on the absence of any legal underpinning for the stop-work order.

“Revolution Wind secured all required federal and state permits in 2023, following reviews that began more than nine years ago,” Ørsted emphasizes. “Federal reviews and approvals included the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Marine Fisheries Service, and several other agencies.”

Ørsted also points out that it is not simply here to plop wind turbines in the water and walk away. The company lists permanent grid upgrades, port infrastructure, and supply chain investments among other elements of its support for the US economy.

Okay, Now Do The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project

Regardless of what happens in court, the Interior Department has yet to clarify what BOEM meant by those mysterious “concerns.”

The stop-work order was signed by BOEM Acting Director Matthew Giacona, who indicated that his office needs time “to address concerns that have arisen during the review that the Department is undertaking.”

This re-review of a project that has already been reviewed and vetted is itself questionable. In normal times, one would expect a convincing explanation of the need for such a drastic step to accompany the order.

But, nah. “In particular, BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas,” Giacona wrote, and that’s all he wrote.

Why play it so close to the vest? For that matter, if any wind farm has raised legitimate “national security interests,” that would be the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, located in the mid-Atlantic region. Defense officials have previously identified potential conflicts between offshore wind farms and military operations in the mid-Atlantic, from Delaware on down to North Carolina with Virginia in between.

CVOW workers probably don’t have anything to worry about, at least not yet. The Republican Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, has championed the project and the White House doesn’t have a particularly obvious reason to embarrass him by stopping it in mid-stream.

That story could change after Election Day in November, when the term-limited Youngkin will have to fork his title over to someone else — if not to the Republican candidate, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, then to the Democratic challenger, Abigail Spanberger.

Things already took an ominous turn last week, when Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy clawed back millions in federal funding for 12 seaport upgrades that were supposed to support offshore wind, among other industries. Included in the group were two projects in Virginia totaling about $60 million. Hold on to your hats… or your jobs….

Photo: The Danish offshore wind developer Ørsted is suing to left the stop-work order against its 704-megawatt Revolution Wind project, located off the coast of Rhode Island (courtesy of Ørsted).