New York Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of 17 other attorneys general on Monday in filing a lawsuit to end the Trump administration’s halt on new wind energy development across the country.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued a presidential directive suspending all federal approvals for wind energy projects, threatening to undermine a critical source of clean energy and job growth in the United States. As a result, countless wind energy project applications are now frozen, including one project off the coast of Long Island and Brooklyn.
The coalition argues that this blockade on all wind energy projects is unlawful and will seek a preliminary injunction to immediately stop the administration from enforcing the freeze while litigation proceeds, according to a press release.
“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy,” said James. “This arbitrary and unnecessary directive threatens the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments, and it is delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.”
Locally, the executive order put a stop to the development of Empire Wind 1, a wind farm project off the coast of Long Island. This directly affects the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, the project's offshore wind hub, where construction has already started with over 1,000 union members.
The president’s directive is at odds with years of bipartisan support for offshore and onshore wind energy projects, including during President Trump’s first term, the coalition said. It also directly contradicts the president’s own Executive Orders issued on the same day, which declared a “national energy emergency,” singled out New York and several other states for the country’s lack of energy supply, and called for the expansion of most forms of domestic energy production, but not wind energy.
New York’s wind projects currently support over 4,400 jobs throughout the state and was expected to create more than 18,000 additional new jobs in the coming years.
“President Trump’s presidential order halting the development of wind energy threatens thousands of good-paying jobs and jeopardizes our ability to build a reliable, affordable and clean energy grid for the benefit of all New Yorkers," said Governor Kathy Hochul.
James warned that the halt on wind energy development will delay the replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy, a shift that will exacerbate climate, public health, and environmental harms to people across the nation and the globe. It will also impede the state to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% by 2040 as required by the New York Climate Law, she said.
