Federal officials pulled the plug on the Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind project on March 14, 2025, as Environmental Appeals Court Judge Mary Kay Lynch ruled to remand a Clean Air Act permit issued last September to Atlantic Shores back to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
According to the Asbury Park Press, EPA officials filed a motion in February to have the court remand the permit to the agency, in order to review the wind energy project’s environmental impacts. The action came in response to President Donald Trump’s January memorandum to withdraw all of the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leases for further review.
In 2021, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) awarded Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind a contract for 1.5 megawatts of renewable energy production to be generated in a facility off Atlantic City, but Judge Lynch’s decision could threaten the future of that project.
“I am glad to announce that the Atlantic Shores South wind project off of Long Beach Island (LBI) and Brigantine, NJ has been sunk,” said Bob Stern of Save LBI, the organization which had petitioned the federal government to review of the Clean Air Act permit issued to the offshore wind developer. Stern noted that Shell New Energies, a 50% owner of the Atlantic Shores project, announced that they were stepping away from the project just 20 days after his organization had filed a comprehensive federal lawsuit against the project.
“Save LBI had appealed that EPA permit approval to the Appeals Board as did Administrator Lee Zeldin, and the Board agreed that further review is warranted,” Stern added, calling this a “major victory for shore values, communities, others and common sense.”
“But there is also unfinished business here to ensure that this project, or a similar one, never reappears, and that the flawed federal and State processes and impact assessment methods that carried such a costly and damaging project this far are fundamentally changed,” Stern noted.
Case in point, Empire Wind 1, currently owned entirely by the Norwegian company Equinor, is slated to begin pile-driving on May 1 of this year to install 54 offshore turbines in a federally approved lease area located roughly 12 nautical miles south of Long Island, and about 16.9 nautical miles east of Long Branch, N.J.
While the lease area itself is situated in federal waters within the NY Bight, power will be brought onshore at the Sunset Park Onshore Substation located next to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. After that, the power will continue to Gowanus Brooklyn Substation where it will interconnect into the New York City power grid.
