E+E Leader Team
A federal judge has thrown out the nationwide freeze on wind permits, ending nearly a year of stalled projects and mounting uncertainty across the renewable energy sector.
In a detailed ruling, Judge Patti B. Saris found that the administration’s Wind Order—introduced on Inauguration Day 2025 and used to halt every onshore and offshore wind authorization—had no legal footing and didn’t meet even the basic requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.
The case was brought by 17 states, the District of Columbia, and the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, which together laid out a picture of paused projects, stranded capital, and delayed climate targets. The court agreed. Several major offshore wind developments, including New Jersey’s Atlantic Shores and Massachusetts’ SouthCoast Wind, had already pushed back timelines or pulled permit applications after agencies stopped processing them. State energy offices described immediate economic impacts—from lost tax revenue to higher projected electricity costs for ratepayers. ACE NY’s members reported something similar: contracts canceled, investment plans shelved, and workforce reductions as projects hit a standstill.
Judge Saris focused on a straightforward point: the Wind Order wasn’t a minor procedural pause. It altered the status quo overnight.
Agencies acknowledged they would not resume issuing permits until a “Comprehensive Assessment” was completed, yet they offered no timeline, no scope, and no materials showing the work had meaningfully begun. That alone, the judge wrote, made the freeze a final agency action, not an internal step shielded from review.
The government argued the freeze stemmed from a presidential directive and should therefore escape APA scrutiny. The court rejected that argument outright. No statute requires agencies to follow a presidential suspension of wind permitting, and without that statutory hook, agencies must still provide a reasonable explanation for their actions. Here, the record was virtually empty—just the President’s memo and a short Interior Department instruction. There was no analysis of alternatives, no assessment of environmental or economic impacts, and no acknowledgement of the shift away from decades of permitting practice.
Beyond insufficient reasoning, the judge found a second, independent flaw: an indefinite halt on permit decisions violates the APA’s timing requirements. Federal agencies are required to process applications and conclude matters “within a reasonable time.” Pausing the entire federal wind review pipeline—potentially for months or years—ran directly against that duty. “Not acting at all is not a lawful option,” she wrote.
Vacatur, not a narrower remedy, was the outcome. The court noted that the Wind Order functioned as a blanket federal policy and could not be partially unwound on a project-by-project basis. With the order void, agencies are expected to resume normal permitting—though how quickly that happens may vary depending on staffing and how far projects had advanced before the freeze.
For states pushing toward ambitious 2030 and 2035 clean-energy targets, the ruling removes a significant bottleneck. And for developers navigating tight project finance windows, supplier contracts, and interconnection queues, it reopens the federal pathway that had effectively been blocked since January.