Trump Admin Stops Again 6 GW of Offshore Wind Leases

Two weeks after a judge struck Following President Donald Trump’s executive order that blocked offshore wind energy development, the White House has again suspended leases for five major projects, this time citing concerns about radar interference.

“Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of affected adversary technologies, and vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects near our East Coast population centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement Monday. statement.

Affected projects include Revolution Wind in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, as well as Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, both located in New York. In total, these projects represent nearly 6 gigawatts of production capacity for the East Coast, a hotspot for data center development.

The Interior Department justified the action by citing unclassified government reports — it did not say which agency produced them, or any connection to them — as well as “recently completed classified reports” from the Pentagon. The ministry said it would give the government time to work with stakeholders to address national security concerns.

The statement fails to acknowledge the ongoing work the government and wind developers have been doing for years to address national security concerns, specifically related to radar.

The report the Home Office is likely referring to was issued by the Ministry of Energy in February 2024and it lists a number of projects then underway to alleviate the problem of radar interference. (Other reports over the years have been tasked with addressing the same concerns, some dating back to the previous Trump administration.)

“To date, no mitigation technology has been able to fully restore the technical performance of impacted radars,” the 2024 report states. “However, the development and use of radar interference mitigation techniques, as well as collaboration among federal agencies and between the federal government and the wind industry, have allowed federal radar agencies to continue to fulfill their missions without significant impact, and have also enabled significant wind energy deployments across the United States.”

Radar interference caused by wind turbines is not new. Researchers have been studying the phenomenon for more than a decade and have developed a range of strategies to mitigate the problems.

Wind turbines present a unique challenge for radar operators.

“The motion of a wind turbine gives it a complex Doppler signature,” Nicholas O’Donoughue, a principal engineer at Rand Corporation, told TechCrunch.

Doppler refers to the change in frequency of a wave, such as a radar signal, caused by a moving object. As the blades of a wind turbine travel their arc, they alternately move towards and away from the radar station. Blade angle and speed can also have an effect.

These factors, along with other considerations, may “challenge the detection of any target located near the wind farm,” O’Donoughue said.

But radar systems can filter signals from wind farms. “The main approach is to use adaptive processing algorithms, such as space-time adaptive processing, to learn the interference structure of a wind farm,” he said.

“Over time, reflections from a wind farm can be processed to look for patterns, which can then be adapted and removed. This process is analogous to how modern adaptive noise-canceling headphones work, although more complicated.” Objects with a low radar cross section can still pass through, he noted.

For this reason, many wind farms are already built with radar installations in mind. “The most basic and widely used mitigation method is wind farm siting, such as changing the configuration of a proposed wind farm to keep wind turbines out of direct radar view,” the Department of Energy’s 2024 report states.