New Jersey offshore wind faces another blow from Trump administration
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In another blow to New Jersey’s nascent offshore wind industry, the Environmental Protection Agency has pulled a Clean Air Act permit for the Atlantic Shores project, citing President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order hitting the pause button on offshore wind. In “remanding” the permit, construction on the project cannot begin without additional review and approval by the agency.
Attorneys for Atlantic Shores had argued that the executive order on offshore wind did not apply to what they say is the final permit issued by the EPA under former President Joe Biden in September.
“Atlantic Shores is disappointed by the EPA’s decision to pull back its fully executed permit as regulatory certainty is critical to deploying major energy projects,” Atlantic Shores spokesman Terance Kelly wrote in an email. “Atlantic Shores stands ready to deliver on the promise of American energy dominance and has devoted extensive time and resources to follow a complex, multi-year permitting process, resulting in final project approvals that conform with the law.”
But the judge who issued the order, after Atlantic Shores declined to “voluntarily remand” its permit, wrote that the Environmental Appeals Board, an administrative tribunal that reviews EPA decisions, has “broad discretion” when pulling a permit.
The project’s Clean Air Act permit relates to air pollutants from the wind farm’s construction, including intensive pile driving necessary to install monopiles into the seabed, which are the poles that hold the turbines. The proposal includes 195 turbines that would sit about nine miles off the coast of Atlantic City, near the Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge. Industrial activities near a refuge have specific permit requirements.
Save Long Beach Island, a group that opposes the project, filed a petition challenging aspects of the permit. The group questioned the modeling that estimated the emissions, the extent of the particulate matter pollution and the potential emissions from decommissioning the site decades into the future.
“So the numbers they came up with [in the permit application], we just don’t know if they actually represent the real world situation,” Bob Stern of Save Long Beach Island said. “We felt that these approvals had a lot of significant flaws, that the science was not sound, that the mathematics being used to calculate impact was not sound, and frankly the reviews were biased towards promoting the project.”
Just two days before the Atlantic Shores permit was pulled, however, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced 31 potential rollbacks of environmental rules, including a rule aimed at reducing haze at wildlife refuges, and a rule that limits emissions of an air pollutant known as PM 2.5.