A string of federal court decisions this week ordered construction to resume on several East Coast offshore wind projects that the Department of the Interior had paused in December, handing developers and grid operators an unexpected reprieve.
The administration’s stop-work order—issued days before Christmas and aimed at five projects totaling roughly 6 gigawatts of capacity—was justified by officials as a national security concern, largely focused on potential interference with radar systems. Judges in separate courtrooms in Washington, D.C., and Virginia were unconvinced that a blanket halt was warranted, and three projects were cleared to resume: Empire Wind (south of Long Island), Revolution Wind (off Rhode Island), and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project.
What the courts said
Two rulings drew particular attention. U.S. District Judge Jamar Walker in the Eastern District of Virginia granted Dominion Energy a preliminary injunction allowing CVOW to restart, calling the administration’s suspension overly broad in context of the Virginia project. CVOW is the largest offshore wind project under construction in the U.S.—176 turbines intended to supply power for roughly 600,000 homes and scheduled to begin dispatching by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
In Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols pressed the government over its legal rationale during hearings, noting that Interior’s brief failed to grapple directly with the plaintiffs’ claims that the stop-work order was “arbitrary and capricious.” According to reporting from the hearings, Nichols pointed out that the government’s filings didn’t even use the word “arbitrary,” undercutting the force of its administrative defense.
Two projects remain tied up in court: Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind has a hearing set for February 2, and Vineyard Wind 1 developers only recently filed their suit. The litigation timeline means construction and dispatch schedules across the region remain fragile.
Why this matters beyond turbines
Offshore wind isn’t just about cleaner electricity for coastal towns; it’s about capacity where the demand is growing fastest. Northern Virginia hosts the world’s largest data center market, and expanding AI workloads are a big reason those facilities are consuming more power. Dominion warned that stopping CVOW for any length of time would threaten grid reliability for “some of the nation’s most important war fighting, AI and civilian assets.” The connection between large-scale renewables and the digital economy is becoming impossible to ignore — even prompting long-range ideas like Project Suncatcher that imagine new ways to site compute power.
At the same time, AI-driven services and tools are multiplying the electricity appetite of data centers, a dynamic explored recently in reporting on Gemini’s Deep Research and other high-intensity applications. Those trends put a premium on adding cost-effective, firming capacity to regional grids; offshore wind is one of the cheapest new sources of large-scale generation in many markets.
Federal studies paint a large upside: the East Coast could deliver up to 110 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2050, and a national technical potential estimate has placed U.S. offshore wind at the scale of tens of thousands of terawatt-hours—several times current consumption if fully realized. That potential explains why developers have invested billions and why courts are being asked to balance security concerns against near-term grid needs.
The core technical dispute
The government’s cited risk—radar interference from turbine blades—has long been part of siting and permitting conversations. Engineers say mitigation is often possible: careful siting can avoid critical radar lines of sight, and upgrades or software filters for radar installations can reduce false clutter caused by rotating blades. Courts appeared to expect the administration to show that those standard mitigation options were insufficient before imposing a blanket construction stop.
Policy and personality have also colored the headlines. President Trump’s public skepticism of offshore wind—he quipped to oil executives “I’m not much of a windmill person”—added a political overlay to what might otherwise have been a technical dispute between agencies and developers.
For now, developers whose projects have been allowed to resume are moving quickly to restart work and keep schedules intact; shares of Dominion rose modestly on the news. But the legal fight is not over. With remaining suits still pending and additional hearings on the calendar, the industry could face more uncertainty in the weeks ahead.
This episode is a reminder that the transition to a grid built for the 21st-century economy will involve legal as well as engineering challenges. The turbines themselves are only one piece of a puzzle that includes radar systems, military preparedness, grid planning, and the voracious electricity needs of modern technology hubs. How regulators and courts sort those priorities will shape not only how quickly turbines rise off the coast, but how reliably power reaches the places that need it most.