Texas group resurrects Vineyard offshore wind suit in Trump petition
Texas Public Policy Foundation revisits arguments in its failed litigation against flagship project to leverage President's anti-industry stance
In a bid to resurrect a failed lawsuit against Vineyard Wind, Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is now skirting the courts and going straight to the top by petitioning the Trump administration directly to void the flagship project’s approvals.
The Austin-based conservative policy group has filed an administrative petition requesting the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Department of the Interior (DoI) “reconsider the prior administration’s approval of the construction and operations permit for the enormous Vineyard Wind 1 project,” it said in a release.
The 800MW project owned by Iberdrola’s US subsidiary Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is under construction in its lease 15 miles (24 km) off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
It is the first commercial-scale US offshore wind project to be fully permitted and enter construction, although Orsted’s much smaller, 132MW South Fork, beat it to commercial operations.
“The [former President Joe] Biden Administration violated at least thirteen provisions of federal law when it approved the Vineyard 1 offshore wind project,” TPPF senior attorney Ted Hadzi-Antich claimed.
This new move by TPPF aims to leverage President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day memorandum freezing offshore wind leasing and permitting and putting existing arrays under review with a goal of termination or modification.
“President Trump’s requested review of offshore wind projects gives the Secretary [of the Interior Doug Burgum] a golden opportunity to correct the previous administration’s missteps when it came to approving offshore wind projects,” said TPPF attorney Eric Heigis.
Among those is the argument that the Biden administration violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) governing economic uses of coastal waters.
Secretary Burgum's order Tuesday said the Biden administration's “misreading” of OCSLA allowed it “to proceed as though it could balance one consideration, such as offshore wind development, with others, rather than ensuring that all factors, including protection of the environment, marine mammals, commercial fishing, and other existing ocean uses, are fully met.”
“That was always our interpretation in the litigation, and that now seems to be Interior's interpretation, and we applaud that interpretation,” he said.
Hadzi-Antich added in the release that the petition provides Interior Secretary Burgum with the legal ammunition to rescind Vineyard's COP “and to issue an order requiring that the entire area be remediated to the condition it was in prior to the approval of the COP,”.
The project saw a major mishap last year when a blade on one of its installed turbines collapsed, spewing debris into the waters off Nantucket and washing up on area beaches.
The disaster led to several months work stoppage and the replacement of numerous blades manufactured in Canada that were shone to have deviations.
A decision by the Trump administration will need to come fast, though, as the project is nearing completion.
As reported by Iberdrola in its recent earnings call, 24 GE Vernova 13MW Haliade-X turbines have been installed, and 17 are already feeding the grid. The project will eventually have 64 turbines.
The project is expected to be completed by year’s end, although the project has extended its lease at the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal into 2026, an indication it is hedging its deadline.