By Guest Author Meghan Lapp
The Trump Administration turned heads in April when it issued a stop work order on the Empire Wind offshore wind project off New York based on rushed permitting by the Biden Administration- but then gave those same heads whiplash in May when NY Democrat Governor Hochul and other NY Democrat officials apparently convinced the Administration to reverse course and allow construction to proceed, rushed permits or not.
Empire Wind has allegedly been one of the most controversial offshore wind projects on the East Coast. Prior to the project area being leased in 2016 during the last weeks of the Obama Administration, multiple federal agencies had implored the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to consider resiting the lease due to serious conflicts identified at that time.
As early as 2013, the Department of Homeland Security informed BOEM that nearly the entire project area is a US Coast Guard Weapons Training Area, which it uses to maintain law enforcement proficiency, and requested that BOEM respect this existing use. BOEM ignored it.
In 2015, again prior to BOEM’s leasing of the area, the US Coast Guard requested that BOEM whittle down the lease to incorporate a 2 nautical mile setback from the maritime traffic lanes leading to the entrance to NY Harbor, as well as a 5 nautical mile setback from the actual entrance itself because, incredibly, the project was sited right between two of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. BOEM ignored this request too, and leased the area with only a 1 nautical mile setback, leaving large vessels with a “high/medium” risk of collision.
In July 2016, National Marine Fisheries Service similarly recommended that, due to major conflicts with two of the nation’s most valuable commercial fisheries- the squid (i.e. calamari) and sea scallop fisheries – BOEM re-evaluate the lease area and eliminate the sections of the lease area that posed the greatest conflict with fisheries prior to issuing the lease. Of course, true to form, BOEM ignored this recommendation, as Obama’s BOEM Director Abigail Hopper had already announced “I’m not a marine biologist, but I’m a history maker” and proceeded to discuss how the Obama Administration and state of New York would make history with New York’s first offshore wind farm regardless of any pesky commercial fishing concerns. Instead, BOEM held an auction for the Empire lease site on December 15-16, 2016, pushing the project forward just a few short weeks before the first Trump Administration took office, essentially leasing the entrance to one of the United States’ most strategic ports to a foreign nation- to Statoil, now Equinor, a company 67% owned by the government of Norway.
During the first Trump Administration, major issues with offshore wind in general and Empire Wind in particular were identified, and no project approvals moved forward.
The very real problem of radar interference of all sorts- including marine radar, air surveillance radar, and defense radar- came to light. One 2020 study commissioned by the Trump Administration to investigate the impact of offshore wind on radar found that Empire Wind covers nearly the entire line of sight of JFK Airport’s air surveillance radar and that “aircraft surveillance in the southeast region would be impacted with wind turbine detections interfering with an aircraft flying over the vicinity of Empire Wind”, which just so happens to be on the approach to JFK airport. This same study also concluded that “a large region…will be affected by false targets and reduced detection probability for aerial radar targets” and “[i]n addition to the detection degradation, there will be many false targets in the vicinity of Empire Wind….over the entire wind farm. This can allow aircraft to hide within these false targets, making detection of an aircraft difficult while over the wind farm.”
Anyone who remembers 9/11 knows how important air surveillance radar is, not to mention the more recent issues with aircraft incidents on the East Coast. How will the FAA prevent a tragedy like that of the midair collision at Reagan Airport in January if the detection of aircraft over the Empire Wind project is compromised? How will incidents like the Air Traffic Control outages at Newark Airport be handled if other airport radars in the area are rendered unreliable? Unfortunately, the FAA still today has no answers to these questions, and has taken no pre-emptive action, because it has instead maintained that “BOEM maintains jurisdiction for structures located beyond 12 [nautical miles]” from shore regardless of impact to FAA operations, and relegated the safety of American air passengers to a lesser level of importance than an Obama/Biden New Green Deal energy project.
The first Trump Administration also commissioned an investigation into offshore wind’s impact to marine vessel radar, which was released by the National Academies of Sciences in 2022. The report concluded that all classes of marine radar would be degraded by offshore wind, resulting in a major impact to maritime safety, but concluded that no immediate solutions are available, and only suggested areas for future study. Remember how BOEM ignored the Coast Guard’s request for large setbacks from the New York shipping lanes and harbor entrance? You should.
It also became public that the US Coast Guard had not conducted any analysis on its own vessel capabilities in the face of marine radar interference, nor had it analyzed its own search and rescue performance in various sea or weather conditions, should a maritime disaster occur in the vicinity of a wind farm- rather, it left all that analysis up to the wind developer itself. Tragically, in 2019, lives were lost in incident involving a fishing vessel sinking off Rhode Island’s Block Island Wind Farm where the USCG transcript states 6 times that the rescue helicopter was unable to conduct search and rescue operations and aborted its mission because of high winds, low visibility, and “hazards in the area (i.e. wind farm)”. Yet still today, with Empire Wind’s construction going forward, the actual impact of offshore wind farms to the US Coast Guard’s own capabilities goes unaddressed. If you’re a US mariner, get scared.
In 2020, the Trump Administration’s Department of Energy held a webinar identifying various forms of US military radar that would be negatively impacted by offshore wind: terminal area air traffic control radars, enroute air traffic control radars, defense long-range air surveillance radars, weather radars, ground based military unique radars, missile tracking radars, etc., and confirmed that offshore wind construction is a threat to homeland security and defense. Even though there are no current proven solutions to address these threats, the Biden Administration approved Empire Wind in 2023, requiring that Equinor (the government of Norway) enter into an agreement with the US Department of Defense to come up with “possible” undefined future mitigation measures that “might include” various options, some of which have already been found ineffective. The Biden Administration plan was- approve the project now, figure out minor things like national defense later.
Meanwhile, in December 2024, while the Biden Administration was on its way out the door and approving as many offshore wind projects as it could as quickly as possible, our NATO allies in proximity to Russia were busy killing offshore wind projects because of national defense concerns. While residents of New York and New Jersey were terrified because of unidentified drone activity above their homes, Estonia was declaring that wind turbines interfered with their ability to detect drone attacks and missile launches. Sweden, meanwhile, was rejecting 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea because of “unacceptable risks” to national security – offshore wind radar interference would have reduced Sweden’s incoming missile detection time by half and interfered with their ability to detect enemy submarines- which considering Sweden’s proximity to Russia and the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict is astronomically more important than a “green energy” project.
The real question here is why isn’t it more important to the United States also? Why are we allowing Empire Wind to move forward when we know it was approved without any actual or identified solutions to the same DOD issues?
And remember the commercial fishing industry that BOEM knew was in trouble from the Empire Wind project before it was even leased? BOEM’s solution there was to just to offer non-specified “compensation” amounts calculated by the developer itself, all in accordance with a Biden Administration draft document supposed to offer offshore wind developers guidance on how to compensate US fisheries for losses from offshore wind. Yes, you read that right. A draft document. Not even a real one. The US commercial fishing industry is bracing for losses due to the Empire Wind project as soon as this summer, so when you’re at the beach eating seafood during your summer vacation, prepare for it to be imports just in case. One of the oldest and hard-working industries in the US will be muscled out by a new foreign government-owned “industry” only made possible by Green New Scam taxpayer subsidies, with the loss of a food source as a result. As the Panamanian-flagged “Thialf” crane ship travels from the Netherlands to the entrance to NY Harbor to construct Empire Wind, don’t be fooled by the claim of “American jobs”. If they were American, that would be a US flagged vessel.
The stunning reversal of Trump Administration policy with regards to Empire Wind may also have political ramifications for Republican gains in the Northeast, where many non-voters/former Democrat voters cast their ballot for Trump for the first time in 2024 based on the single issue of offshore wind- including in the state of New Jersey, which has a tight- margin governor’s race this year and is right next door to the Empire project. As grassroots groups up and down the East Coast have organized in opposition to offshore wind, this is a force to be reckoned with.
If you’re horrified by all this, you should be. There will be no beneficiary of Empire Wind other than the government pension fund of Norway. This is not America First.
About the author:
Meghan Lapp is the Fisheries Liaison for Seafreeze, a Rhode Island based commercial fishing company. She is an Advisory Panel member for the New England and Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Councils, an Advisory Council member for the New England Legal Foundation, a member of the NYSERDA Fisheries Technical Working Group on offshore wind, Board Member of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, former member of the Rhode Island CRMC Fisherman’s Advisory Board on offshore wind, former Board member of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance, and the only non-legislative member of the 2019 Rhode Island House Special Legislative Study Commission to Study the Effects of Wind Turbines on Marine Life. She regularly appears on Fox News and worked with the New Civil Liberties Alliance to represent Seafreeze vessels in in the case Relentless Inc v US Department of Commerce, which overturned the Chevron deference at the United States Supreme Court in 2024. She has assisted Real Life Cinema with the production of a new documentary series Deadwind, airing later this year.
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