The action would resolve a lawsuit brought by Ocean City, which says the project poses risks to tourism, fishing, water quality and marine mammals.
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke a Biden-era permit for an $11.5 billion offshore wind farm planned off the coast of Maryland.
In a court filing on Aug. 25, the U.S. Department of the Interior said its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is “in the process of reconsidering its prior approval” of the project’s construction and operations plan, which was issued in the final days of the Biden administration.
The department indicated it intends “no later than September 12 to remand and, separately, to vacate” the approval document.
The move came in coordination with Ocean City, a resort town on Maryland’s southeastern shore that sued the Interior Department last year to block the project, which would be built a little more than 10 miles offshore. Both parties request that the court put the case on hold while the Interior Department works to resolve the dispute by rescinding the permit.
The project developer, US Wind, maintains that its permit is legally sound.
“Our construction and operations plan approval is the subject of ongoing litigation, but we remain confident that the federal permits we secured after a multi-year and rigorous public review process are legally sound,” the Baltimore-headquartered company said in a statement to multiple media outlets.
US Wind, which is 80 percent owned by the Italian renewable energy firm Renexia and backed by U.S. asset manager Apollo Global Management, won federal approval in December 2024 to build the Maryland wind farm. The project is central to the Biden administration’s goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Planned to be built in phases, it could include up to 114 wind turbines, four offshore substations, one meteorological tower, and four export cable corridors, with an expected capacity of more than 2 gigawatts. BOEM had estimated it would generate enough electricity to power more than 718,000 homes and support about 2,700 jobs each year over seven years of development.
By Bill Pan
