Lamont, Surrounding State Governors Promise Fight For Halted Wind Power Projects

by Donald Eng The New Haven independent

HARTFORD, CT — The governors of four Northeast states, including Connecticut, promised to fight back against the Trump administration’s latest attempt to shut down five offshore wind power generation projects.

In a joint statement, Gov. Ned Lamont and governors Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Kathy Hochul of New York and Dan McKee of Rhode Island said the latest attack on clean energy “lands like a lump of dirty coal for the holiday season.”

Revolution Wind, one of the affected projects, is a wind energy facility under construction 15 nautical miles off Rhode Island and expected to deliver enough electricity to the New England grid to power 350,000 homes, or 2.5 percent of the region’s electricity supply beginning in 2026.

Pausing active leases for completed and nearly completed projects defies logic, the governors said, and will hinder energy independence efforts, increase energy costs and eliminate thousands of good-paying jobs.

“This baseless, reckless, and erratic action from the Department of Interior will also inject further uncertainty into the markets, making it harder for states and private companies to secure financing for public works projects if investors know they can be stopped at any time despite having gone through all the necessary local and federal approval processes,” they wrote.

The four governors cited a federal judge ruling earlier this month that the administration cannot shut down federal approvals of wind permits arbitrarily and said they are committed “to again fight back to ensure these projects move forward and provide power, jobs, and grid reliability to our communities.”

In a Monday morning announcement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cited unspecified national security risks identified in recently completed classified reports related to offshore wind energy in pausing five projects including Revolution Wind “to assess the possibility of mitigating the national security risks posed by these projects.”

Later in the announcement, Burgum said there were long-existing unclassified reports that wind power turbines can interfere with radar.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, on Monday called such national security claims absurd. In a statement of his own Tuesday, Blumenthal, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said he had written to Burgum and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to demand a classified briefing on the “contrived” national security concerns regarding Revolution Wind by Jan. 8, 2026.

Blumenthal referenced a previous request he made in September following an earlier attempt to halt Revolution Wind. He said his September letter, in which he requested information regarding similarly vague national security concerns, never received a response.

“If the administration has information about a threat so serious as to demand the immediate cessation of work on five different offshore wind projects up and down the East Coast, it should have provided this information in response to my original request in September,” he wrote. “The secretive and nonsensical way in which these leases have been suspended leads me to believe the national security concerns cited are just another thinly veiled pretext to carry out President Trump’s ongoing vendetta against wind energy projects.”