South Jersey congressman working with Trump to halt offshore wind

This story is part of the WHYY News Climate Desk, bringing you news and solutions for our changing region.

From the Poconos to the Jersey Shore to the mouth of the Delaware Bay, what do you want to know about climate change? What would you like us to cover? Get in touch.

New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew, a Republican from Cape May County, said he’s working with President-elect Donald Trump on an executive order that “would halt offshore wind on the East Coast.”

“These offshore wind projects should have never been approved in the first place,” Van Drew said in a statement, referring to President Joe Biden’s effort to expand renewable energy as a “reckless green agenda that put politics over people.”

He says the executive order is just the first step in reversing course on the state’s offshore wind development.

“We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home,” Van Drew said.

But much of Biden’s offshore wind goals have been cemented with final federal permits that likely cannot be reversed with an executive order, including the Atlantic Shores South project, a 1,520-megawatt project with 195 turbines planned off the coast of Atlantic City.

While a few projects, including the proposed Atlantic Shores North, also off the coast of New Jersey, may be halted with an executive order because its final permits have not been approved, the devil, as always, is in the details of the order’s language and what that will signal for permitted projects.

“We’re gonna be looking very carefully at the language of the executive order,” said Tim Fox, an industry analyst at the nonpartisan, Washington-based Clearview Energy Partners.  “OK, no more offshore wind … moving forward. But are they gonna try to undermine projects that are currently under construction?”

Fox said Trump could use the Justice Department to stop current projects that have gained all their permits. Offshore wind opponents have filed lawsuits challenging federal permits, including those for Atlantic Shores South.

So Trump could instruct the department to simply not defend these cases.

“There’s lawsuits already pending from projects that the Biden administration took, and those permits have thus far been upheld by the courts because the Biden administration has vigorously defended them in court,” Fox said. “We don’t think the Trump administration is going to be inclined to defend those decisions in court.”

Biden set a goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes. The Atlantic Shores project is expected to power 700,000 homes.

But opposition to offshore wind in New Jersey is strong, where residents say it will destroy the view and hurt tourism, harm marine mammals like the Atlantic right whale and impact the fisheries. Trump made a promise to Van Drew at a rally in Atlantic City last May.

“We are going to make sure that that ends on day one,” Trump said at the rally. “I’m going to write it out on an executive order, it’s gonna end on day one.”

Scientists say the whales are not killed by offshore wind development, but by ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

Two small offshore wind farms exist along the East Coast, including the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island and the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot project. The recently completed South Fork project off the coast of Long Island, New York is the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. Three more are under construction, including Vineyard Wind, Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Dominion Energy’s expanded Coastal Virginia Wind project.

Biden had also planned new offshore wind lease sales in his second term in the Gulf of Maine, off the coast of New York and in the Central Atlantic. Fox said those will likely not happen under a Trump administration.

Prior to the election, when asked about the impact of a Trump win, a spokesperson for New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration said in a statement that the state “is committed to a strong and thriving offshore wind industry in the years and decades to come to capture the lasting economic, workforce, and environmental benefits it brings to our state.”

Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a think tank that provides assistance to states like New Jersey and Delaware, said that without seeing the language of the executive order, it would be hard to “know the exact consequences.” But she added that large corporations, including some Big Oil companies, are behind offshore wind.

“While opposition groups are gearing up, the President will need to balance the interests of the many large corporations — many in red states and who are also donors to his campaign and to the Republican Party — who are experiencing the economic benefits of offshore wind right now,” Oleth said in an email. “Offshore wind means new manufacturing facilities and Americans at work today. It means growing the electricity supply to meet power-hungry data centers.”

Union jobs are also at stake, and Trump garnered support from members of the building trades unions during November’s election. New Jersey is counting on jobs at the new wind port in Salem County and the state has also invested $164 million dollars in EEW’s manufacturing plant in Paulsboro. The plant produces monopiles, the massive poles that support the wind turbines.