Offshore wind giant comes out swinging against 'bad faith' Trump vendetta

SouthCoast Wind hit back at the Trump administration’s attack on the project’s permits in a strongly written court filing condemning the “bad faith” effort to kill the entire offshore wind industry.

Ocean Winds, SouthCoast’s owner, said: “Federal Defendants have no genuine legal basis to reconsider the COP; they seek only to use remand to withdraw the COP approval and eliminate the Project.

“This is evident through both the Trump administration’s obvious disdain for offshore wind and the fact that Federal Defendants’ Motion is a verbatim, copy-and-paste request” made in other ongoing litigation against the industry, the developer added.

SouthCoast, under development in the Massachusetts wind energy area, is contracted to Massachusetts for 1GW and Rhode Island for 200MW. Its COP was approved by the administration of former President Joe Biden at the end of 2024.

It is among the many offshore wind projects targeted by the Trump administration as part of his pledge to kill the industry "on day one" of his term.

President Donald Trump’s notorious Inauguration Day memorandum to kill the industry put even approved projects under review with a goal of termination.

It also greenlights DoJ to side with plaintiffs in anti-industry litigation.

Towards these aims, government lawyers requested the District Court for the District of Columbia to stay litigation while coastal regulator Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) reconsiders approval of the project's construction and operations plan (COP).

The legal maneuvers are part of litigation in the DC district court instigated by the Massachusetts island of Nantucket and other plaintiffs.

“BOEM is reviewing its approvals associated with the Project and has determined, based on its review to date, that it wishes to reconsider its COP approval,” said DoJ's acting assistant attorney general Adam Gustafson in a 19 September motion.

“After its reconsideration proceedings, BOEM likely will take a further agency action, and that action may affect – and possibly moot –Plaintiffs’ claims,” Gustafson said, adding: “To avoid potentially needless or wasteful litigation, the Court should remand the COP approval and enter a stay.”

In its response, SouthCoast called DoJ's request an “overt litigation tactic... made in bad faith without any legal authority or regard for the impact on SouthCoast Wind or the public at large.”

Last July, secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees BOEM, issued a new and much stricter interpretation of OCSLA, to which it is now reviewing approved offshore wind projects.

OCSLA was not raised in Nantucket's suit, and SouthCoast called it a “pretext” being employed “to reconsider validly issued approvals”.

“The Court should weigh in on Federal Defendants’ interpretation of OCSLA and decide this key legal issue before even considering whether to grant the remand request,” SouthCoast said.

Judge Royce Lambert, who is presiding in the SouthCoast case as well, called the Revolution stop-work order “the height of arbitrary and capricious”, potentially bolstering Ocean Winds in its project defence.