Offshore construction has finished on Vineyard Wind, a major Massachusetts offshore wind farm, with the installation of the final blades completed Friday night, Craig Gilvarg, a spokesperson for the project, said Saturday. The project is the first to reach that construction stage during President Donald Trump’s tenure, even as Trump has frequently criticized wind power.
The project is located about 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, and it has 62 turbines that the project says will generate a total of 800 megawatts—enough clean electricity to power about 400,000 homes.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said completion of the project is essential to ensuring the state can lower costs, meet rising energy demand, advance its climate goals and sustain thousands of good-paying jobs. The construction milestone also arrives as offshore wind firms and states work through legal and regulatory challenges tied to the Trump administration’s earlier policy shifts.
During the Trump administration, offshore wind construction on five major East Coast projects was halted days before Christmas. The administration cited national security concerns, but developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, with the rulings effectively concluding that the government did not show the national security risk was so imminent that construction had to be stopped.
Another project in that group, Revolution Wind, began sending power for the first time to New England’s electric grid on Friday, starting a ramp-up expected over the following weeks until it is fully operational. Vineyard Wind, by contrast, has been generating power for more than a year as additional turbines were finished.
The Vineyard Wind project faced scrutiny over an earlier equipment problem. The Trump administration had been particularly critical of Vineyard Wind after a blade failure in July 2024, when fiberglass fragments of a blade broke apart and began washing onto Nantucket beaches during the tourist season. GE Vernova agreed to pay $10.5 million in a settlement to compensate island businesses that reported losses from the incident.
Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal plans to build the offshore wind farm in 2017. Massachusetts had required its utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind by 2027, and federal regulators later delayed Vineyard Wind in 2019 by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement.
Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts. The Biden administration signed off on the environmental approvals in 2021, as it sought to expand offshore wind as a climate solution.
The United States has been building offshore wind in phases. The nation’s first U.S. offshore wind farm opened off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016, at the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure, but it used just five turbines and was not commercial-scale. The nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm opened in March 2024, when President Joe Biden was in office; it was built by Orsted and Eversource, called South Fork Wind, and it has 12 turbines east of Montauk Point, New York.
Trump began reversing energy policies with executive orders on his first day in office that aimed to boost oil, gas and coal. 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.”