A federal judge in Virginia on Friday granted a preliminary injunction allowing construction to resume on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, making it the third East Coast offshore wind project this week to win a court order blocking the Trump administration’s 90-day lease suspension. The ruling followed similar orders earlier in the week that cleared Empire Wind off New York and Revolution Wind serving Rhode Island and Connecticut to restart work.
All five paused East Coast offshore wind projects had active lawsuits before federal courts by the end of the week, with three having already obtained preliminary injunctions allowing construction to resume while the legal challenges proceed.
The Trump administration announced last month that it was suspending leases for at least 90 days on five East Coast offshore wind projects, citing national security concerns. The announcement did not specify the nature of those concerns. Developers and states sued to block the order.
In the Virginia case, a judge granted the request of Dominion Energy Virginia — which is developing Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind — for a preliminary injunction, according to the record from the hearing. Dominion argued the government’s order is “arbitrary and capricious” and unconstitutional. The company said after the hearing that it will focus on restarting work to ensure the project can begin delivering energy in weeks, citing growing demand from dozens of new data centers.
Federal judges in the District of Columbia ruled earlier this week that construction could also resume on Empire Wind, a New York project developed by Norwegian company Equinor, and Revolution Wind, a project for Rhode Island and Connecticut developed by Danish company Orsted.
Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond Law School professor who has been following the lawsuits, said the three courts reached a common conclusion about the administration’s legal position.
“They concluded that Trump’s effort to halt the important, but costly, projects lacked support and would injure the entities building them, so the projects must be permitted to proceed,” Tobias said.
Tobias said the three judges essentially concluded that the government did not show the national security risk was imminent enough to require halting construction.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said this week that Trump has been clear that “wind energy is the scam of the century.” Rogers said the pause is meant to protect the national security of the American people, and “we look forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”
Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, applauded the week’s rulings, which enable union members to return to the job sites.
“With energy demand surging and prices spiking, the last thing our government should do is take any form of power generation offline,” McGarvey said in a statement. “The men and women of NABTU are proud to be constructing every offshore wind project in the United States, all under strong project labor agreements. These rulings mean our members can get back to work and keep affordable, clean, reliable power moving to our communities.”
The fifth paused project, Vineyard Wind — a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners under construction in Massachusetts — filed a complaint in District Court in Boston on Thursday, joining the other developers in challenging the administration. Orsted is also suing over the pause of its Sunrise Wind project for New York.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind has been under construction since early 2024. The project, located about 27 miles (43 kilometers) off the shores of Virginia Beach, will consist of 176 turbines providing enough electricity to power about 660,000 homes, according to Dominion Energy.
Virginia’s U.S. senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, along with U.S. Reps. Bobby Scott and Jennifer McClellan, said in a joint statement that the ruling is a victory for the state’s residents, who otherwise “would face increased energy costs as a result of the Trump administration’s shortsighted opposition to clean energy.”
Large ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of plans to shift to renewable energy in East Coast states that have limited land for onshore wind turbines or solar arrays.