The Trump administration on Monday allowed construction to restart on a huge wind farm off the coast of Long Island, a month after federal officials had issued a highly unusual stop-work order that had pushed the $5 billion project to the brink of collapse.
In a statement, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, said she had spent weeks pressing President Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to lift the government’s hold on the wind farm.
The project, known as Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor and when finished is expected to deliver enough electricity to power 500,000 New York homes.
“After countless conversations with Equinor and White House officials, bringing labor and business to the table to emphasize the importance of this project, I’m pleased that President Trump and Secretary Burgum have agreed to lift the stop work order and allow this project to move forward,” Ms. Hochul said on Monday evening.
When the Trump administration halted work on Empire Wind last month, it stunned observers and sent shock waves through the wind industry.
Equinor had obtained all necessary permits for the project after a four-year federal environmental review, and the company had already begun laying foundations for the project’s turbines on the ocean floor. Another 1,500 workers had begun constructing a marine terminal in Brooklyn.
Then, in mid-April, Mr. Burgum claimed that the permits had been rushed and ordered all work to stop immediately.
But the Trump administration, which has frequently criticized the wind industry, never shared evidence of its claims with either the company or the public, and gave no indication of when the stop-work order might be lifted.
Faced with uncertainty, Equinor began warning that it might have to cancel the project, which was already 30 percent complete. The company said it had been losing $50 million every week that construction was halted, with nearly a dozen vessels sitting idle and workers on the sideline.
On Monday, however, Equinor said work would now restart and still aimed to complete the wind farm by 2027.
“I would like to thank President Trump for finding a solution that saves thousands of American jobs and provides for continued investments in energy infrastructure in the U.S.,” said Anders Opedal, the chief executive of Equinor. “I am grateful to Governor Hochul for her constructive collaboration with the Trump administration, without which we would not have been able to advance this project and secure energy for 500,000 homes in New York.”
It was not immediately clear how Ms. Hochul persuaded the White House to lift its stop-work order.
Ms. Hochul had emphasized to Mr. Trump that terminating the wind project would kill more than 1,000 jobs among workers from parts of New York that supported him, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the governor’s conversations.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has stated several times his desire to see more natural gas exploration in the Northeast as well as the completion of the Constitution Pipeline, which would carry gas from Pennsylvania to eastern New York but faced opposition from environmental groups as well as New York state officials. It was canceled in 2020.
While there was no specific bargain related to the pipeline, Ms. Hochul said in a statement that “New York will work with the administration and private entities on new energy projects that meet the legal requirements under New York law.”
Those new energy projects could include pipelines.
The White House and Interior Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has been a critic of wind power for years, ever since he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built in view of one of his Scottish golf courses. On his first day in office in his second term, he signed an executive order that halted approvals of new offshore wind farms and directed Mr. Burgum to explore the possibility of “terminating or amending” any leases that had already been issued.
Among other complaints, Mr. Trump has called the large wind turbines unsightly and insisted that offshore wind farms are killing endangered whales in the Atlantic Ocean, although scientists have said they haven’t found evidence to support that.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s stop-work order on Empire Wind appeared to be on shaky legal ground, experts said.
“I am not aware of any instance where a project of this sort that has gotten all its permitting has been legally halted,” said Joel Eisen, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “The lack of evidence to support the decision is a strong signal that a federal court would probably find this to be an arbitrary and capricious decision.”
On April 21, Mr. Burgum said in a social media post on X that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “have revealed that the Biden administration’s rushed approval of the Empire Wind project was built on bad & flawed science.”
Mr. Burgum linked to a Fox News story that claimed to have seen such a report. But the Interior Department and NOAA did not respond to a request by The New York Times to release the report. And the Trump administration also declined to share its findings with Equinor, according to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, who assailed the administration’s actions in a speech on the Senate floor last week.
“It’s a rare moment when the Trump administration reverses itself, but what they did here was so egregious I think they had no choice,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview on Monday.
The collapse of the project would have posed major challenges for New York, where grid operators had been counting on the construction of several new offshore wind farms to provide large quantities of electricity without producing any planet-warming emissions. To fight global warming, New York has set aggressive targets for using renewable energy but is not on track to meet those goals.
New York already has one offshore wind farm in operation, South Fork, which is capable of producing 132 megawatts of electricity, roughly enough for 70,000 homes. Empire Wind is expected to have 816 megawatts of capacity. Another project, Sunrise Wind, being planned off Montauk, N.Y., would have 924 megawatts of capacity.
Without those wind farms, New York City and Long Island could face the risk of electricity shortages in the years ahead, with few ready alternatives, according to a recent study by Aurora Energy Research, an analytics firm.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
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