The Trump administration has suspended 6 GW of offshore wind leasing for the second time

Two weeks later the judge he struck President Donald Trump’s executive order that has banned offshore wind development, the White House is once again suspending financing for five major projects, this time citing concerns about radar interference.

“Today’s action will address the nation’s emerging threats, including rapidly evolving adversary technology, and the vulnerability created by large offshore wind projects near our eastern seaboard,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Monday. words.

Affected projects include Revolution Wind in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, and Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, both based in New York. In total, these projects represent about 6 gigawatts of power generation on the Eastern Seaboard, where data centers are located.

The Interior Ministry justified this by citing unnamed government reports – it did not say which agency produced them, nor was it affiliated with – and “recently selected reports” from the Pentagon. The branch said it will give the government time to work with its partners to address national security concerns.

The statement did not acknowledge the work the government and wind manufacturers have been doing to address national security concerns, particularly related to radar, for years.

The report that the Department of the Interior had to say was issued by the Department of Energy in February 2024and it mentions a number of activities that were being done to reduce the problem of radar interference. (Other reports (For years he has been tasked with addressing the same concerns, some dating back to the previous Trump administration.)

“To date, no mitigation technology has been able to restore the performance of affected radars,” the 2024 report said. “However, the development and implementation of measures to reduce radar interference, as well as cooperation between government agencies and between the federal government and the wind power industry, have allowed government agencies to continue their operations without problems, and have helped wind power to be deployed across the United States.”

Radar jamming due to wind turbines is not uncommon. Researchers have been studying this species for more than a decade, and have developed a number of strategies to mitigate any potential problems.

Wind turbines present unique challenges to radar operators.

“The motion of a wind turbine gives off a complex Doppler signal,” Nicholas O’Donoughue, senior engineer at Rand Corporation, told TechCrunch.

Doppler refers to the change in frequency of a wave as a radar signal due to a moving object. As the wind turbines sweep sideways, they move in parallel and away from the radar station. The angle and speed of the blades can have an effect, too.

This, along with other considerations, “could challenge the recognition of any targets in the vicinity of the wind farm,” O’Donoughue said.

But radar systems can filter information from wind farms. “The first method is to use adaptive algorithms, such as Space-Time Adaptive Processing, to study the structure of the wind farm disturbance,” he said.

“Over time, the reflections from the wind farm can be adjusted to see a pattern, which can be compared to compression. This is similar to how modern noise-canceling headphones work, albeit more complex.” Objects with a low radar range can still pass through, he said.

Therefore, many wind farms have already been built with radars in mind. “The most common and widely used mitigation method is wind farms, such as changing the shape of the proposed wind farm so that the turbines are not visible on the radar line,” the Department of Energy’s 2024 report said.