Trump administration halts 6 gigawatts of offshore wind leases again

Two weeks after the judge hit down Following President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking offshore wind development, the White House again halted leases for five large projects, this time citing concerns about radar interference.

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

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

The Interior Department justified the action by citing unclassified government reports — neither naming nor associated with the agency that produced them — along with “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 did not acknowledge the ongoing work that the government and wind energy developers have been doing to address national security concerns, especially related to radar, for years.

The report to which the Home Office was likely referring was Issued by the Department of Energy in February 2024He lists a number of projects then underway to mitigate the problem of radar interference. (last Reports Over the years they have been tasked with addressing the same concerns, some of which date back to the previous Trump administration.)

“To date, no mitigation technology has been able to fully restore the technical performance of affected radars,” the 2024 report said. “However, the development and use of radar interference mitigation technologies, and cooperation among federal agencies and between the federal government and the wind industry have enabled federal radar agencies to continue to perform their missions without significant impacts, and have also enabled significant deployment of wind energy throughout the United States.”

Radar interference caused by wind turbines is nothing new. Researchers have been studying this phenomenon for more than a decade, and have developed a range of strategies to mitigate any problems.

Wind turbines present a unique challenge to radar operators.

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

Doppler refers to the change in frequency of a wave such as a radar signal generated by a moving object. As the blades of a wind turbine sweep across their arc, they move alternately toward and away from the radar station. The angle and speed of the blades can also have an impact.

These considerations, along with others, could “challenge detection of any targets close to the wind farm,” O’Donoghue said.

But radar systems can filter out signals generated by wind farms. “The basic approach is to use adaptive processing algorithms, such as adaptive spatio-temporal processing, to learn the wind farm interference structure,” he said.

“Over time, the reflections from the wind farm can be processed to look for patterns, which can then be matched and suppressed. This process is similar to how modern adaptive noise-cancelling headphones work, albeit more complex.” He noted that objects with a low radar cross-section could still sneak through.

For this reason, many wind farms have already been built with radar installations in mind. “A basic and widely used mitigation method is wind farm siting, such as modifying the layout of the proposed wind farm to keep wind turbines out of radar line of sight,” the 2024 DOE report said.