After a series of delays, a federal judge last week temporarily stayed a lawsuit against Dominion Energy’s wind farm off the Virginia Beach coast.
Judge Loren AliKhan of the U.S. District Court in Washington ruled that the groups involved must decide whether they wish to proceed by late September. The lawsuit does not currently affect Dominion’s ability to move forward.
The delays in the case stem from changes in federal leadership and policy under President Donald Trump, who has taken action to halt the offshore wind industry.
The $10.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will be the nation’s largest, with 176 turbines expected to produce 2.6 gigawatts of electricity. The utility started building it last year and says it is more than halfway finished.
Shortly before construction began, a coalition of conservative interest groups filed suit against both Dominion and the federal agencies that approved the project’s final permitting in 2023.
The plaintiffs include the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which have long opposed renewable energy projects and rejected the scientific consensus that human activities are driving climate change. They argue federal officials failed to adequately consider the Virginia project’s potential impacts to marine life, including whales, citing the Endangered Species Act.
Dominion points to measures it is required to use to protect marine life, such as reduced boat speeds and dampening the sound of underwater construction.
Judge AliKhan rejected the groups’ initial request to halt construction, saying there wasn’t enough proof that plaintiffs would suffer irreparable harm from the project moving forward, but she allowed the wider case to proceed.
Federal scientists have repeatedly stated they’ve found no evidence of a link between whale deaths and offshore wind development, and the government’s attorneys said as much in court.
That was under the Biden administration. Trump, however, has echoed plaintiffs’ concerns about offshore wind.
On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order to pause all new federal leases and permits for wind energy.
It also directed federal officials to “review the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases.” That review is ongoing.
Federal defendants in the Virginia Beach case recently filed a joint request with the groups that are suing them, asking the court to grant an extension.
The agencies “are under new leadership, who require time to become familiar with the issues presented by this litigation and the Presidential Memorandum and to determine how they wish to proceed,” attorneys wrote.
Judge AliKhan responded by staying the case until further notice while the parties decide what they want to do.
Dominion declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said its wind farm remains on schedule to be completed in late 2026 and “will be delivering its first electrons to the grid in only a few months.”
The first turbine blades for the project arrived at Portsmouth Marine Terminal over the weekend. Onshore work to build underground and overhead transmission lines is set to finish this summer.
H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Heartland Institute’s climate and environmental policy center, said the goal was to prevent Dominion from building the project at the outset.
It’s “too late for that,” he said, but hopes the judge could rule this fall to prevent further construction next year. Dominion is only allowed to do certain offshore work between May and October, when endangered whales are least likely to pass through.
Whether or not Heartland and CFACT decide to continue the case, Burnett said they’re looking for Trump to intervene outside the courtroom.
“I think our best hope is that the Trump administration steps in and says, ‘You know what? We've decided that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued these permits wrongly,’” Burnett said. “They didn't consider the cumulative impacts of all the wind projects up and down the coast on the whales.”
Heartland has previously advocated against the Endangered Species Act, which is now the legal basis of its lawsuit. Burnett said they still believe the law “has serious flaws,” but that it was not adequately enforced for Dominion’s wind farm.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration recently proposed narrowing the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. The revised rule would limit that definition to direct actions such as shooting protected species and exclude indirect actions, including habitat destruction.
It’s unclear how such a change would impact the government’s stance on offshore wind’s impacts to whale habitat.
