Virginia Beach Wind Farm, spared from Trump’s order, but future projects can be delayed, experts say – Virgina news

“This will have an effect on all future leasing contracts,” says Eileen Wall, director of the offshore energy program for Virginia’s head at the Sierra Club.

According to the executive order on Monday, the Trump administration will stop all offshore wind leasing in the federal waters, in addition to suspending the permit and approval for any wind project, both on the shore and on the shore. The order notes that “nothing in this withdrawal does not affect the rights to existing leasing contracts in the withdrawn areas.”

However, the order instructs the Secretary of the Interior to review the environmental, economic and environmental need for termination or amendment of such leasing contracts, defining any legal bases for such removal and presentation of a President’s report.

Wall said the order language seems to show a willingness to continue after existing leasing contracts. However, she noted that speaking was one thing until “having the legal basis to do it is really different.”

Asked if the Trump administration would try to change the leasing of Virginia Beach’s wind farm, Dominion Sliton spokesman said comments made by Trump’s nominee for Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum. Burgum said during a hearing on January 16 about existing projects that “if they make sense and they are already a law, then they will continue.”

“CVOW clearly meets this standard,” Sliton says in an email.

Grayson Holmes, a senior lawyer in Virginia for the Southern Environment Center, said that after a project like Wind Farm by Virginia Beach, it could be a difficult battle. Dominion installed 78 of the 176 monopic foundations of the turbines last year before stopping construction for the season. Construction will be restarted in May after the whale migration season.

Still, Holmes said the executive order could delay two projects to dominate years of construction: a site of 40,000 acres near Kiti Hawk, North Carolina, in external banks purchased by Avangrid in 2024 and 176 505-Akra lease, also near Virginia’s leasing Beach last summer.

“They are on a break so far so they can make this type of evaluation,” Holmes said.

Woll is also worried that the executive order will affect Hampton Roads economic development efforts to attract companies that produce parts for huge offshore wind turbines. A representative of a submarine cable company LS Greenlink told the Virginian pilot earlier that he did not see a threat to the company from the Trump administration, as the planned Chesapeake facility would not be completed by 2028. Another developmental employee was hoping for Trump to change Its decision, given its purpose to return US production jobs.

Trump waged a verbal war against wind turbines as it failed to block wind installation near a planned golf course near the Scottish city of Aberdeen in 2015, without evidence, claims that the installations were killing birds and whales and enchanted how much energy was Energy sources of production cost.

One of the three conservative Dominion organizations that seek to stop the construction of Wind Farm Virginia Beach applauds executive orders. H. Sterling Burnet of the Heartland Institute said in a statement that the orders had withdrawn from former President Joe Biden’s “uneven climate projects” and canceled the restrictions on the development of fossil fuels.

The Heartland Institute, along with several other conservative groups, argue in court that the wind power plant is a danger to endangered species in the right whale in the North Atlantic. A judge denied a temporary order that would stop construction in a decision in May and the case continues.