US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said the Trump administration’s stop-work order for Orsted’s 704MW Revolution Wind project is partly due to the possibility of “swarm drone attacks” that would use wind farms.
Burgum made the comments speaking to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“In particular there are concerns about radar relative to undersea, and it doesn’t have to be a large Russian sub but undersea drones, a new technology,” Burgum said.
“People with bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm,” he said, adding that several cabinet members had presented concerns to Trump.
The 22 August letter from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ordering Orsted to stop work said the bureau “is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas”.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had both voiced opposition to wind farms to Trump recently, Burgum told Collins.
Burgum said that Kennedy had specifically presented concerns to Trump based on a blade failure at CIP and Iberdrola’s 804MW Vineyard Wind array that left fragments of the GE Vernova Haliade-X blade washing up on a Nantucket beach.
Burgum also pointed to tax credits for offshore wind developers as part of the administration’s opposition to the industry.