Two weeks after a judge struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that blocked offshore wind development, the White House is again pausing leases for five large projects. This time, officials are citing concerns over radar interference.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the action addresses emerging national security risks. He pointed to vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects located near east coast population centers.
The affected projects include Revolution Wind in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, and Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, both in New York. In total, these projects represent nearly 6 gigawatts of generating capacity for the Eastern seaboard, a region experiencing significant data center development.
The Department of the Interior justified the pause by citing unclassified government reports, though it did not name the producing agencies or provide links. It also referenced recently completed classified reports from the Pentagon. The department stated this would give the government time to work with stakeholders to address the national security concerns.
The statement did not acknowledge the ongoing work that government agencies and wind developers have been doing for years to address these exact concerns.
A likely referenced report was issued by the Department of Energy in February 2024. It lists several projects then underway to mitigate radar interference. Other reports on the same issue have been commissioned over the years, some dating back to the previous Trump administration.
That 2024 report stated that no mitigation technology has been able to fully restore the technical performance of impacted radars. However, it noted that the development of mitigation techniques and collaboration among federal agencies and the wind industry have allowed radar agencies to continue their missions without significant impacts, while also enabling significant wind energy deployments.
Radar interference caused by wind turbines is a well-studied phenomenon researched for over a decade. Wind turbines present a unique challenge because the motion of their blades creates a complex Doppler signature, which can challenge the detection of nearby targets.
Experts explain that radar systems can use adaptive processing algorithms to learn the structure of a wind farm’s interference and suppress it over time. This process is analogous to how modern noise-cancelling headphones work, though more complicated.
Because of these challenges, wind farm siting is a primary and widely used mitigation method. This involves modifying the layout of a proposed wind farm to keep turbines out of the direct line-of-sight of radar installations.