Less than 24 hours after President Trump dealt a catastrophic blow to five major offshore wind farms on Monday, the Democratic governors of several Northeastern states began plotting a strategy to save them.
In a hastily arranged conference call on Tuesday morning, the governors started to craft a two-pronged plan. They discussed suing the Trump administration over its pause on leases for the five wind farms under construction off the East Coast, while simultaneously negotiating with the White House on a possible deal to let the projects proceed.
“We’ll be exercising our rights and doing everything we can to keep these projects going,” Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat of Connecticut who participated in the discussion, said in an interview on Tuesday.
At the same time, Dominion Energy, the developer of the largest offshore wind farm that has been targeted, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, brought the first legal challenge. The complaint, filed Tuesday in federal court in Virginia, argued that the administration’s actions were causing the company “immediate, irreparable harm” and $5 million in losses per day.
At stake overall is about $25 billion of investment in the five wind farms, which were expected to create 10,000 jobs and to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses.
In addition to Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the projects targeted on Monday were Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind off New York, and Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Connecticut. In addition to Mr. Lamont, the call included governors or their staff members in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.
Mr. Lamont said that Democratic attorneys general in these states would probably file a complaint that argued that the pause on leases was arbitrary and illegal. But he also suggested that he was open to approving new natural gas pipelines in the Northeast, a top priority for the president, in exchange for the administration allowing the wind farms to move forward.
There appears to be precedent for such a deal.
In April, the Trump administration ordered construction to stop on the $5 billion Empire Wind project, a huge wind farm off the coast of Long Island. After weeks of negotiations with Gov. Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, the administration allowed construction to resume. White House officials suggested they had relented only after Ms. Hochul agreed to approve new gas pipelines in the state. She has denied that any such agreement was made, saying her recent approval of a gas pipeline was part of a broader effort to bring more energy to the state.
In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Hochul said she was infuriated that the Trump administration had moved again to stop Empire Wind. She said she doubted the claim by the administration that wind farms posed an unspecified national security threat.
“I think the underlying premise that this is based on national security concerns is B.S.,” Ms. Hochul said. “If you have any evidence that there’s national security threats along our coasts of our states, you better tell me what it is, because my job is to protect my state.”
Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, told Fox News on Monday that classified reports from the Defense Department had found that wind farms could interfere with radar systems. “These projects, they create radar clutter,” he said.
Ms. Hochul said the governors would demand that the Trump administration explain the national security concerns. She said she had not spoken to President Trump since the pause was announced, and that she had tried to reach Mr. Burgum, but that he had not returned her call.
Absent from Tuesday’s conference call was Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican of Virginia, who has been a rare conservative champion of offshore wind power, and Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat who last month won the Virginia governor’s race to succeed Mr. Youngkin. Representatives for Mr. Youngkin and Ms. Spanberger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Hochul noted that the governors of the affected states would all be Democrats once Ms. Spanberger was sworn in. “Is it a coincidence?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
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The administration’s move on Monday left intact just two operational wind farms in U.S. coastal waters — one small project off Rhode Island that began running in 2016, and a larger project off New York that has been fully operational since 2023.
In an unusual warning, the operator of the regional electric grid in New England said on Monday that it was counting on Vineyard Wind’s power to provide heat and electricity to customers this winter. Any delays to that wind farm or to Revolution Wind, which is more than 80 percent completed, “will increase costs and risks to reliability in our region,” it said.
Mr. Trump has been hostile to wind energy, particularly offshore wind farms, for years. He has falsely claimed that wind turbines in the ocean are “driving the whales crazy” and that the renewable energy source “kills all the birds.”
On the first day of his second presidential term, Mr. Trump issued an executive order halting all approvals of new wind farms on federal lands and waters. His administration has since gone after wind farms that had received permits from the Biden administration and were either under construction or about to start operations.
The administration’s approach has faced significant legal setbacks. Earlier this month, a federal judge struck down the executive order that halted permits for new wind projects, saying it was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law.
Michael Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said he thought a legal challenge to the pause would likely succeed.
“I think there’s no reason to believe the administration’s case is any stronger than it was before,” Mr. Gerrard said. He noted that the administration has also raised national security concerns in the past that did not hold up in court, as when a judge ruled in September that work on the Revolution Wind project could restart after the Trump administration tried to stop it.
“If they had really strong evidence, they would come out with it,” Mr. Gerrard said.
During a meeting at the White House on Friday, Mr. Burgum presented options for addressing the five wind farms under construction in U.S. coastal waters, according to two people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
No final decision was made on Friday, and discussions continued over the weekend, the two people said. Many lobbyists and workers in the offshore wind industry said they were shocked by the announcement on Monday.
“Who does this right before Christmas?” said Michael F. Sabitoni, the general secretary-treasurer of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which represents about 300 of the nearly 1,200 workers at Revolution Wind.
Thomas Kilday, 23, an apprentice electrician who has been working on the Revolution Wind project for the past year, was on board a work boat the first time Mr. Trump stopped his project. This time, he was home in Fall River, Mass., waiting for his next four-week shift, which was to begin after Christmas.
“I don’t know if I’m getting back on the boat,” Mr. Kilday said. He said working on a wind farm appealed to him because it felt like cutting-edge technology. But seeing Revolution Wind be stopped twice so near completion had made him wonder if there was a future in the industry.
“It’s like running a marathon and getting tripped 100 feet from the finish line,” he said.
Eric Troia, 41, an industrial painter working on Vineyard Wind 1, spoke from a boat that was ferrying workers from the work site to the shore in New Bedford, Mass. He said it could be the crew’s last trip for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Troia, who has three children under the age of 5 and a stepson heading to college, said he was supposed to spend Christmas applying protective coatings to turbines and towers in the ocean.
“It’s a sacrifice, but it pays for a Disney trip,” he said. He called the uncertainty and potential job loss “gut-wrenching.”
Antonio Gianfrancesco, 24, was on a Sunrise Wind substation about 30 miles off the coast of Montauk, N.Y., on Monday moving cargo when he learned that the federal government had suspended the work.
“I was taken aback to be honest, especially because this is the holiday season,” he said. “It’s already financially stressful, so just putting that on me and all the other workers is insane.”
Mr. Gianfrancesco, who helps support a younger sister in high school and another in college, said he and about 150 others working on the substation — including iron workers, electricians, painters and carpenters — were waiting to find out if they still had jobs.
“I don’t want to get too deep into politics, but it’s very disrespectful to the working class in general,” Mr. Gianfrancesco said. “It’s thousands of jobs at a standstill.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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