Supreme Court Won’t Hear Challenge to Offshore Wind Turbines in Cape Cod

The ruling was made after a federal agency ruled the project would not harm the North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Jan. 15, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The U.S. Supreme Court declined a request from Massachusetts residents to review a lower court’s rejection of their challenge to federal approval of offshore wind turbines that generate electricity.

The decision to deny the petition in Nantucket Residents Against Turbines v. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management came in an unsigned order on Jan. 13. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its decision.

The residents argued that a wind farm in the Cape Cod community was placing an endangered species of whale, the North Atlantic right whale, at risk and that federal agencies failed to follow the law when assessing the environmental impact of the project. They also said the turbines were damaging the local environment.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is an agency inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The bureau’s mission is to manage the development of “U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way.” The OCS refers to all submerged land and seabed that belongs to the United States but falls outside the jurisdiction of individual U.S. states.

The federal government approved locating the country’s first utility-scale offshore wind turbine project, known as Vineyard Wind 1, 15 miles off the coast of Nantucket. The project is owned by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, which do business through Vineyard Wind LLC, which in turn is building Vineyard Wind 1, according to the petition.

The project is promoted as the first of the government’s “coordinated steps” to build about 30 wind turbine projects “along the Atlantic seaboard that, when built out, will have thousands of turbines covering millions of acres of federal submerged lands.”

Vineyard Wind LLC has built or is in the process of building 47 of the total of 62 approved fixed-bottom wind turbines. Each turbine rises 853 feet above the water and is almost triple the size of the Statue of Liberty.

The petition states that the 47 turbines are already harming the environment. For example, in July 2024 a large piece of a 350-foot blade broke off from one of the turbines and fiberglass shards from the blade littered Nantucket’s beaches. Also, the turbines may threaten the endangered North American right whale, only 388 of which still exist, by interfering with their habitat and migratory routes, according to the petition.

Moreover, even though federal law requires the government to examine the “best information available” regarding the impact that a project may have on an endangered or threatened species and their habitats, the BOEM and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) failed to consider the “cumulative impacts of other planned projects when they authorized and issued permits to construct the Vineyard Wind 1 Project,” according to the petition.

The residents say the agencies that leased the water area to wind energy companies left relevant data out of their assessment so they could facilitate offshore wind energy development.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled against the residents in May 2023. Talwani determined that they had failed to establish that BOEM or NMFS violated the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) during the approval process.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed Talwani’s ruling on April 24, 2024. The First Circuit specifically found that NMFS’s environmental assessment “was not defective” and that BOEM’s reliance on it did not violate NEPA.

In a brief filed by U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on Dec. 10, 2024, BOEM urged the Supreme Court not to accept the petition. Prelogar wrote that in 2021, the NMFS “concluded that the project is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any listed species, including the right whale.”

And, contrary to the residents’ argument, the decision of the First Circuit does not conflict with existing decisions of the Ninth Circuit and District of Columbia Circuit, the brief stated.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents BOEM, declined to weigh in on the new ruling.

“We don’t have a comment,” Matthew Nies, a public affairs specialist at the department, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 16.

The Epoch Times reached out to the residents’ attorney, Nancie Marzulla of Marzulla Law in Washington, but no reply was received by publication time.