A New Jersey congressman said he’s drafted a possible executive order for president-elect Donald Trump to halt offshore wind energy developments for six months.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-NJ, a vigorous opponent of offshore wind projects, told NJ Spotlight News that he approached Trump about ordering a moratorium, as East Coast opposition groups have demanded of the outgoing Biden administration.
Van Drew said he sent the proposed document on to Trump’s staff and
Trump promised repeatedly to shut down offshore wind development, even as the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management pressed on with planning and approvals in the final year of the Biden administration. Van Drew said the proposed moratorium order would direct federal agencies to review energy, environmental, fisheries and other issues around wind power, which critics insisted have been downplayed by BOEM officials.
Van Drew and other New Jersey Republicans opposed Ørsted’s ill-fated Ocean Wind 1 proposal before the company, faced with mounting costs, abandoned it in fall 2023. Local opponents now focus on the Atlantic Shores project proposed off Long Beach Island, which obtained federal permits in October 2024 but has yet to begin construction in earnest.
Activist group Save Long Beach Island said it filed a new lawsuit Jan. 10 opposing the Atlantic Shores project, a joint venture by Shell New Energies and EDF that would build up to 195 turbines more than 1,000’ tall off barrier island.
The lawsuit names the U.S. departments of Commerce and Interior and agencies including BOEM and the National Marine Fisheries Service, alleging they “were derelict in their respective duties to take critical information into account, and moreover, made arbitrary assumptions that entirely failed to disclose and consider the injurious impacts of the Atlantic Shores South project,” said Thomas Stavola Jr., the lawyer representing Save LBI.
The lawsuit leans into activists’ charges that East Coast offshore wind project surveys and construction have caused whale strandings and deaths, claims that leaped to the forefront of debate with a series of strandings in New Jersey and New York during the winter and spring of 2022-23.
Federal fisheries and energy officials have fiercely disputed that claim since. Trump repeated the accusations leading up to the 2024 election – and now pledges to expand oil and gas drilling, and stymie all wind power development.
Save LBI president Robert Stern said “our review and independent mathematical analyses shows a systemic underestimation of impact, and clearly indicate that the noise caused by pile driving, and, soon after, perpetual operational noise, will injure and kill high numbers of marine mammals,” including endangered right whales.
