Fishing industry delivers fresh blow to Equinor wind farm

More than 15 organisations, including several fisheries and seafood companies, have filed a complaint in the District Court of New Jersey to stop the project going ahead just a couple of weeks after the Trump administration U-turned on its original block and lifted a stop work order.

The saga began after Donald Trump took office in January, when he delayed all offshore wind projects in his Presidential Memorandum to allow investigations to be carried out to determine whether they would cause any ecological, environmental or economic harm.

In April, a stop work order on Empire Wind 1, off New York and New Jersey, was issued to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) by the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, resulting in Equinor considering legal action in resoonse. Just four weeks later the order was overturned.

Doug Burgum is now listed as a defendant in the court filing, along with the BOEM, Equinor and even the Kingdom of Norway itself.

The court filing says the reinstatement order violated the Administrative Procedure Act ‘by failing to offer a factual basis for the reinstatement’ and is ‘arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable’.

“Multiple agencies such as the United States Coast Guard (USCG), the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and BOEM itelf, have identified significant ecological harm that will flow from the turbine construction and operation, harm that cannot be remediated and that will permanently injure the ecology and ecosystem of the waters known as the New York Bight,” the filing says.

”The May 19, 2025 [reinstatement] order is a single sentence with no substance of any kind, let alone any that supports the resumption of work on Empire Wind. No explanation was offered to explain the basis for the reinstatement of the work permit; no results of any investigation were announced; and no factual basis was identified in the May 19, 2025 order to support this administrative reversal.”

The complaint also says that since Equinor is a Norwegian company, ‘it is not legally entitled to an award of a lease on the Outer Continental Shelf’ because it is ‘the controlled agency or instrumentality of a foreign government’.

The list of plaintiffs includes Protect our Coast NJ; Clean Ocean Action; the Fisherman’s Dock Cooperative; American Seafood; the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association; and Ack for Whales, among others.

An Equinor spokesman said: “Equinor signed its federal lease for Empire Wind in 2017. The project has undergone years of rigorous permitting and studies, and secured all necessary federal, state and local approvals to begin construction in 2024. We are aware of the filing but do not comment on pending litigation.”