Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore

Weather Guard Lightning Tech Judge Ends Pentagon Wind Freeze, RWE Exits US Offshore Allen covers a judge lifting the Pentagon’s wind freeze, RWE’s $1.22B US offshore exit, and TotalEnergies buying Shell’s European renewables. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News , our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech . Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube , Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web . And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here . Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday everyone. You know … there is an old saying. When one door closes … another one opens. Well this week in wind energy … a whole lot of doors were swinging. Let us start in Washington. For months … the Pentagon had quietly stopped reviewing wind energy project applications. More than a hundred and fifty onshore wind projects … stuck in limbo. The Defense Department claimed that drones in Ukraine had changed the game. Wind turbines … they said … could blind radar to incoming threats. So they hit the brakes. But on Thursday … a federal judge said … not so fast. Judge Karin Immergut … a Trump appointee no less … issued a preliminary injunction. Resume the reviews … she ordered. Follow the law Congress wrote. The law gives the Pentagon seventy-five days for a preliminary review. As of late July … not a single one had been completed since the halt began in May. When government lawyers were asked to name one project they had reviewed … they could not name a single one. The judge told them plainly. If you want to change the rules … go ask Congress. Now … while one arm of the government was being told to do its job … another arm was writing checks. German energy giant RWE … handed back its American offshore wind leases. New York. California. Louisiana. In return … the U.S. Department of the Interior cut RWE a check for one-point-two-two billion dollars. RWE is the fifth developer to walk away from American offshore wind under this administration. The company had spent more than a billion dollars on those leases. Years of planning. Investment. Partnership with federal agencies. But RWE said there is simply no path forward to permit these projects … for the foreseeable future. So where does the $1.22B go? Nine hundred million dollars into Louisiana LNG. Three hundred million into natural gas turbine reservations. Fifteen gas peaking projects across the country. A company that came to America to build wind farms … is now building gas plants instead. But here is the thing about RWE. They are not leaving