Vineyard Wind — the embattled wind farm off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard — is pushing back against the Trump administration’s stop work order issued late last year.
The company announced Thursday that it has filed for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The step comes on the heels of recent courtroom wins for other offshore developments that had been halted by Trump in December.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia ruled on Monday that Revolution Wind, in Rhode Island, could resume work on the project, which was 90 percent done.
On Thursday, a different federal judge ruled that Empire Wind, in New York, can also get back to work.
Trump’s sweeping Dec. 22 order was in many ways a long time coming, following months of attacks from the administration on the fledgling industry. The order suspended five offshore wind projects due to national security concerns, though the administration did not elaborate on the nature of those issues.
Each of the projects halted by the Department of the Interior had been fully permitted, including reviews that analyzed any security risks.
In announcing its legal step on Thursday, Vineyard Wind stated that the Trump administration’s order violated the law and could lead to immediate and irreparable harm to the project and communities who will benefit from its energy.
Seth Kaplan, vice president of the consulting firm Grid Strategies, said it’s important for the wind farms to get back to work because work stoppage “creates a very real near-term risk of electricity shortfalls.”
“Such shortfalls would cause spikes in prices and run a very real risk of painful and expensive outages,” he said.
Vineyard Wind is nearing the completion of construction off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard and is currently capable of producing some 572 megawatts of power, enough to power roughly 200,000 homes, according to the governor’s office.
The project has been delivering power to the New England grid since the beginning of last year. During a recent cold snap, the project was already eliminating some $2 million a day in costs to ratepayers by displacing the need for additional natural gas, according to an analysis done by the Green Energy Consumers Alliance.
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