Hochul: I tried to persuade Trump officials to lift stop-work order on Empire Wind

With the prospect of shutting down the partially completed Empire Wind offshore wind project just days away, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday said she has "pulled out all the stops" in a last-minute attempt to persuade the Trump administration to lift its stop-work order.

Hochul said she spent part of Mother’s Day "pleading" with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose order stopped work on the $7 billion project off Long Beach, to "reconsider this decision," but the answer was crickets.

Hochul was responding to questions from Newsday on Tuesday after an appearance at Farmingdale State College.

She said she also spoke by phone with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday, asking him to intervene as he traveled with Trump, but that also failed.

"I’ve been intensely involved in this issue ever since the president declared he was hostile to any offshore wind" plan, Hochul said, noting she’s "been in the Oval Office twice and this was a dominant part of the conversation."

"I’ve pulled out all the stops as governor, at the highest-level meetings as you can imagine on this and now there still seems to be a hostility on their part, they want to shut this down," she said, noting the state is among plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by 18 states' attorneys general seeking to overturn the order halting wind-energy projects across the country. "We’re doing the best we can and hopefully we’ll be successful in court."

As Newsday reported Monday, Norway-based Equinor said a difficult decision by its corporate parent to terminate the Empire project may be just days away, as its own attempts to navigate why the Trump administration shut the project down and to address the concerns have been met with silence.

The project is about one-third complete, with land-based operations at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal half-finished, and the company was about to start offshore operations. It had already hired a Dutch vessel to begin dropping rocks around the base of each of 54 planned monopile turbines, which need to be hammered into the seabed, work expected to take place through the summer.

Equinor said it has 11 vessels and hundreds of workers at the ready to start the work, and delays were costing upward of $50 million a week.

Equinor on Tuesday stressed that any decision to terminate the project would be irreversible.

“Time is running out before a forced decision to terminate the [Empire Wind] project needs to be made, if there is no solution involving a lifting of the stop work order,” the company said in an email. “The forced termination of the project will be a point of no return.”

Spokespersons for Burgum and his Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did not return messages seeking comment.

The state and New York City had been planning to receive the more than 800 megawatts of power Empire would have injected into the city grid by late 2026, enough to power some 500,000 homes, Hochul said Tuesday.

Asked how the state would make up for it, Hochul noted that offshore wind remains "sort of a young industry for us, so we had not already become reliant on it" to where it would "have an effect on consumers."

But the state had been working to broaden its energy portfolio and "a clean-energy future requires renewables. So this is a real shame that the Trump administration is killing this," she said.

She said she expected Long Island members of Congress in the majority "to be screaming loudly about this and not letting the administration get away with this."

Instead this week, they are discussing a new bill that would drastically cut back energy tax credits for electric vehicles, solar and wind power, heat pumps and other green-energy options, with some that could disappear by year's end. The tax credit for solar power now stands at 30%, enough to subsidize upward of tens of thousands of dollars of the cost of the projects.

U.S. Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-Bayport), through a spokeswoman, said the congressman "does not support the tax bill as currently written."

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.