White House Halts 6 GW of Offshore Wind Projects, Citing Radar Risks to National Security

Just two weeks after a judge invalidated a similar ban, the White House has again paused leases for five major offshore wind projects, this time citing national security risks posed by radar interference. The move puts a sudden brake on the development of nearly 6 gigawatts of clean energy capacity for the U.S. Eastern seaboard, a critical hub for power-hungry data centers.

“Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in a statement on Monday. The Department of the Interior justified the decision by citing “recently completed classified reports” from the Pentagon, along with unspecified unclassified government reports.

The projects impacted are Revolution Wind (Connecticut/Rhode Island), Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind (Massachusetts), and New York's Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind. Together, they represent a significant power source for a region experiencing an explosion in data center development fueled by the AI boom.

The issue of radar interference is not new. A wind turbine's large, rotating blades can create a complex Doppler signature—the change in a wave's frequency caused by a moving object. To a radar system designed to detect aircraft, this motion can create 'clutter' that masks real targets. However, mitigation strategies have been developed over more than a decade. These range from basic solutions like careful wind farm siting to keep turbines out of a radar's line-of-sight, to advanced algorithms like Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP), which can learn a wind farm's interference pattern and filter it out, much like noise-canceling headphones.

Critics point out that the administration's statement largely ignores years of ongoing collaboration between the government and wind developers to address these very concerns. A February 2024 Department of Energy report, likely the one referenced by the Interior, noted that while no mitigation technology can “fully restore the technical performance of impacted radars,” these techniques have enabled federal agencies to “continue to perform their missions without significant impacts.” This suggests the problem is manageable, not an impasse.