Third major US offshore wind farm is now fully operational

This story was originally published by Canary Media. Read the original version here.

The offshore wind farm Revolution Wind is completely up and running — despite the Trump administration’s repeated and ongoing efforts to halt development of the $6.2 billion project.

On Thursday, the Danish energy giant Ørsted said its 704-megawatt wind farm near Connecticut and Rhode Island began ​“generating up to its full capacity” in October. Revolution Wind began producing smaller amounts of power in the spring, and the company installed the last of 65 turbines in September.

The project is the third U.S. utility-scale offshore wind farm to reach full commercial operations, after South Fork Wind near New York and Vineyard Wind near Massachusetts.

“Revolution Wind will provide enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than 350,000 New England homes, strengthening the region’s supply of affordable, reliable energy,” Ørsted said in an emailed statement after its quarterly earnings call. The company is selling the carbon-free electricity to three utilities in the area: Rhode Island Energy, Eversource Energy, and United Illuminating. 

America’s once-burgeoning offshore wind industry has weathered a series of political attacks since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025. Before his second administration began, BloombergNEF projected that the U.S. would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Now, it expects just 5.9 GW to come online — an amount that reflects the handful of projects that were already completed or under construction at the start of last year.

Despite the diminished pipeline, the carbon-free energy source is still expected to help keep household utility bills in check across the U.S. Northeast, experts say. Revolution Wind and the country’s other completed projects have already played a key role in reducing grid stress during extreme weather events this year.

“Revolution Wind will provide an essential boost of utility-scale electricity to the power-hungry Northeast, delivering a substantial new source of generation, diversifying supply, and strengthening electric reliability for decades,” said Hillary Bright, executive director of offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, in a Thursday statement.

Ørsted hit its power milestone despite being forced to halt construction twice last year.

In August 2025, the Interior Department issued a stop-work order for Revolution Wind, due to unspecified national security threats. That order was tossed out by a federal judge one month later. But in late December, the administration issued new stop-work orders to all five offshore wind projects then under construction. Judges struck those orders down one by one — but not before developers had lost huge sums of money and nearly missed key project deadlines. 

Revolution Wind still isn’t fully out of Trump’s crosshairs. 

In October, the Interior Department asked a federal court for permission to reevaluate the agency’s 2023 approval of the wind farm’s construction and operations plan. While the move didn’t immediately affect the project’s activities, experts said it adds uncertainty around what is now a fully operational installation.

Meanwhile, Ørsted said it’s making progress on another offshore wind development, Sunrise Wind. The developer on Thursday said it has finished installing all of the wind-turbine foundations for the 924-MW project off the coast of Long Island, New York. That installation is expected to be fully operational in the second half of next year.