Construction has finished on Vineyard Wind’s offshore wind farm off Massachusetts, the project said after installing the final blades on Friday night, Craig Gilvarg, a spokesperson for the project, said Saturday.
The completion is the first offshore wind project to reach that construction stage during President Donald Trump’s tenure in office, the Associated Press reported.
Vineyard Wind is located about 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. The project has 62 turbines and will generate a total of 800 megawatts, enough clean electricity to power about 400,000 homes, according to the Associated Press report. Vineyard Wind has been sending electricity to the grid for more than a year as additional turbines were finished.
Another East Coast offshore wind project, Revolution Wind, began sending power for the first time to New England’s electric grid on Friday, the report said. It is expected to scale up over the weeks ahead until it is fully operational.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said the completion of Vineyard Wind is essential to ensuring the state can lower costs, meet rising energy demand, advance its climate goals and sustain thousands of good-paying jobs.
Trump has often criticized wind power and has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Friday night that Trump “reversed course on Joe Biden’s costly green energy agenda that gave preferential treatment to intermittent, unreliable energy sources and instead is aggressively unleashing reliable and affordable energy sources to lower energy bills, improve our grid stability and protect our national security.”
The Vineyard Wind milestone follows a sequence of federal actions and legal challenges tied to offshore wind projects. The Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas on five major East Coast offshore wind projects, citing national security concerns, the report said. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed the projects to resume construction, concluding that the government did not show the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.
The report said Vineyard Wind was among the five projects halted during the Trump administration. It said Revolution Wind, one of the other projects, began delivering power on Friday, while Vineyard Wind has been generating for more than a year.
The Associated Press report also described criticism of Vineyard Wind during the period the administration sought to pause offshore wind development. It said the project faced scrutiny after fiberglass fragments from a blade broke apart and began washing onto Nantucket beaches in July 2024 during tourist season. It said GE Vernova agreed to pay $10.5 million in a settlement to compensate island businesses that suffered losses.
Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal project plans in 2017. Massachusetts later required utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2027. The report said federal regulators delayed Vineyard Wind in 2019 by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement, before the Biden administration signed off on the project in 2021. Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts.
The report said the first U.S. offshore wind farm opened off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016 with a smaller number of turbines at the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure. It said the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm officially opened in March 2024, when President Joe Biden was in office; the wind farm, South Fork Wind, was built by Orsted and Eversource with 12 turbines 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York.