Orsted’s 924MW Sunrise Wind has been cleared to resume work after a Wahsington DC district court judge granted an injunction against the enforcement of a sweeping stop work order from President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior.
Judge Royce Lamberth said in a ruling from the bench that the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did not, in classified material shown to the court, identify which concerns related to Sunrise Wind specifically.
Sunrise Wind is the last of five projects that have won injunctions preventing the enforcement of the shutdown order.
The project was 45% complete at the time of the shut down.
Lawyers representing Sunrise Wind asked Judge Lamberth to focus on the potential loss of access to Jan de Nul’s Connector cable laying vessel.
The Connector has just arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, and is scheduled to begin laying the 80-mile export cable this week.
The vessel has a contractual right to leave the project following a six month campaign, Sunrise’s lawyers said, and is not available again until the third quarter of 2027.
Alternate vessels would not be available on site until the end of 2026, and would still need to go through an eight-month approval process.
The start of export cable laying is a “critical inflection point” for the project, Sunrise lawyers continued, the preventing of which would create a cascading series of delays and increasing costs that would threaten the financial viability of the project.
Lawyers representing President Trump’s Department of the Interior argued that the court owes a level of deference to claims of risks to national security, as the government has said necessitates the shutdown.