‘Nobody's seen it': An elusive report could drive Empire Wind to collapse

Yahoo

16-05-2025

A massive New York offshore wind project may soon be abandoned mid-construction due to a mysterious report that few people in Washington appear to have seen except Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, one Fox News reporter, and the scientists who apparently wrote it.
'Scientists at [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] have revealed that the Biden administration's rushed approval of the Empire Wind project was built on bad & flawed science,' Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted to X on April 21, five days after he issued a stop-work order that halted the Empire Wind 1 project and shocked the industry. His social media posts implied that findings from federal scientists at NOAA were the basis for the extreme measure. Construction can't restart until the Interior Department performs 'further reviews,' he wrote.
Those apparently damning NOAA findings, however, have not been made public. Burgum's office did not respond to Canary Media's requests to share them. Nor have they been shared with Equinor, the project developer. As of May 14, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, hadn't seen them either, despite repeated requests. Even key members of Burgum's own staff in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's renewable energy office have not seen it, Canary Media has learned.
'Nobody's seen this report,' said a career employee at the Interior Department who Canary Media granted anonymity to speak freely for fear of retribution. 'My personal opinion is that it's all bullshit.'
The lack of clarity raises questions about the basis of the Interior Department's initial decision, and what, exactly, its ongoing review is looking at. Desperate for an answer, Equinor has resorted to filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the report. That route could take months or years to deliver — time the project simply can't afford.
The delays have created an 'urgent, unsustainable situation,' according to one Empire Wind executive, who told the Associated Press last week that the company was days away from giving up on the renewable energy project. The costs of idle boats and grounded workers are just too high, she said, bleeding the company of $50 million each week.
Empire Wind 1 comprises a 73-acre onshore terminal and 54 turbines that were being built roughly 20 miles from New York City. The project's onshore work is halfway completed, and at-sea construction started in early April. It took eight years to get to that point, including over four years in the federal permitting process, from 2020 to 2024, despite Burgum's claim that its approval was rushed. The project is crucial to New York state's grid decarbonization goals, which rest heavily on offshore wind power.
About two weeks into at-sea construction, on April 16, Burgum sent a letter to BOEM, a branch of the Interior, that halted the at-sea work. In Burgum's statement about the NOAA scientists' findings, posted on X days later, he linked to a Fox News article that summarizes the contents of a 'study' from NOAA, a sub-agency of the Commerce Department that works closely with BOEM to ensure offshore wind and other ocean energy developments do not run afoul of U.S. laws.
The Fox News journalist appears to be the first and only reporter to access the study's contents.
Industry groups fear Burgum's order sets a dangerous precedent for vaporizing energy projects mid-construction on the premise of politics.
'Stopping work on the fully federally permitted Empire Wind 1 offshore project should send chills across all industries investing in and holding contracts with the United States government,' said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of Oceantic Network, an offshore wind industry group.
Documents obtained by Canary Media indicate that staffers in BOEM's Office of Renewable Energy Programs (OREP) have been denied access to the report.
OREP is the government's 'hub' for offshore wind permitting and federal coordination, said the Interior employee who spoke with Canary Media. Its staff are in constant contact with offshore wind developers, the person added, from the time of lease purchase to the point where 'steel goes in the water.' It's not uncommon, they explained, for a developer and their assigned OREP point-of-contact to meet a few times each month.
The Interior employee said that personnel within OREP, including top-level figures, were not alerted of Burgum's order until the day the news broke: 'There was no BOEM press release … nothing internal went out.'
When it comes to the Empire Wind block, Burgum appears to be keeping BOEM in the dark.
The Interior staffer said that, to their knowledge, no one at OREP has been explicitly asked to help with the ongoing review of Empire Wind's approval that Burgum announced in April.
But a few days after the news broke, OREP was tapped to put together a spreadsheet that summarized 'concerns' about Empire Wind, according to the Interior staffer. The summary was prepared by OREP staff and sent to one of the office's supervisors within the last week, according to emails shared with Canary Media. The spreadsheet listed all concerns raised by the public and other federal agencies during the eight years Empire Wind went from lease sale to full approval.
For each concern raised about Empire Wind, OREP staff were instructed in an email seen by Canary Media to succinctly summarize 'BOEM's response, the extent to which the issue was fully addressed, BOEM's view of whether the concern is mitigated, and whether there is new information that has been identified since [construction and operations] approval that would change the finding or outcome.'
The spreadsheet includes hundreds of concerns — whether they are valid or not — that the public submitted in response to the Empire Wind's environmental impact assessment. OREP staff were instructed to capture as many of them as possible in this 'summary.'
The Interior staffer said the whole exercise smacked of a fishing expedition — 'saying there is a problem and then they have to go searching for a problem.'
Equinor, the wind farm's developer, has also been in the dark.
'The federal stop-work order from the Department of the Interior did not include information about the alleged deficiencies in the approval,' a spokesperson for Equinor told Canary Media.
Equinor has since submitted 'repeated requests' to Burgum's office for the NOAA report, according to the spokesperson, in addition to filing the FOIA request.
The Norwegian energy giant has already invested $2.7 billion into building the project's onshore and offshore infrastructure. It's anxious to know if it can still get a return on its investment — and turbines in the sea — but information has been hard to come by.
'While there have been some meetings, that does not include Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,' Equinor's spokesperson told Canary Media. Last week, an Equinor executive met with a top White House official, Bloomberg reported, but the meeting appeared to yield little beyond another dire warning.
'If no progress is made within days, Equinor will be forced to terminate the project,' Molly Morris, president of Equinor Renewables Americas, told Bloomberg on Monday. 'We are still fighting every day to find a resolution.'
Equinor is a familiar face in Washington. It has particularly long-standing relationships with conservatives, as the company has invested over $60 billion in the U.S. since the early 2000s, mostly in oil and gas. The company spokesperson said that 'Equinor has over 100 oil and gas leases in the Gulf of America,' referencing the new name President Donald Trump bestowed on the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year.
Now, it's Democrats who are backing Equinor and joining its call for Burgum to hand over the NOAA report.
In an impassioned speech, Sen. Schumer of New York compared the halt of Empire Wind to a 'dictatorship' where whim reigns and due process dies.
'I call on [Commerce] Secretary Lutnick to immediately release the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that was used as justification to halt work on the Empire Wind project. New Yorkers, Americans, the company, which invests heavily in America, deserve to know. Why halt this project? What's the deal?' said Schumer on the U.S. Senate floor on Wednesday.
The senator also spelled out the incredible stakes should Equinor walk away.
Empire Wind is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). According to Equinor, it will create roughly 2,500 new jobs in the New York area over the lifetime of the project. Roughly 1,000 of those employees are already at work.
Empire Wind 1 is also a critical component of New York's strategy to address climate change and get 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. It's the largest energy infrastructure project the state has undertaken in the last 50 years, according to NYSERDA President Doreen Harris, who in an April 17 statement lambasted the Trump administration's stop-work order for doing ​'irrefutable harm.'
It's also important for helping New York City meet its humongous and growing electricity needs.
Empire Wind 1 is one of the only 'new capacity sources' slated to come online in the near term for New York City and Long Island, according to a report released Monday by Aurora Energy Research. Should the project be canceled, alternatives are scarce: It can take up to eight years to build a new fossil-gas turbine, the report found, and more speculative energy sources like small modular nuclear reactors lack necessary federal approvals to fill in the gap. That makes Empire Wind 1, and offshore wind in general, key to the city being able to provide reliable and affordable energy to its millions of residents.
In late April, during its first-quarter earnings call, Equinor's CEO floated that the company was considering legal action against the U.S. government over its stop-work order. It's the last lever the company has to pull to preserve the project. An Equinor spokesperson told Canary Media on Friday that the company's stance on weighing legal options has not changed.
Schumer has heavily encouraged the firm to sue. 'We think it's illegal. And in fact, I have a call today into the head of [Equinor] to tell him to go to court, you'll win the case,' Schumer told reporters in early May. 'Our lawyers we've consulted think they have no basis to suspend it.'
The Interior employee shared Schumer's sentiment.
'My personal hope is that Equinor does sue. Because I think what they would find during discovery is that we have no new information,' the employee said. 'There's nothing that was not already considered during the [permit] process that would warrant this change in decision.'