As if the turbulent seas had momentarily stilled, the contention surrounding offshore wind energy development along New York and New Jersey’s coasts experienced a sudden lull. This came as an advocacy group decided to hoist the white flag, at least for the time being.
A Twist in the Windy Tale
“Save Long Beach Island,” along with its president Robert Stern, decided to drop anchor and retract its sails against the might of the Biden administration’s wind energy push. Their decision to voluntarily abandon their suit, filed just at the dawn of 2022, came as a sudden gust after federal agencies declared the group’s amended complaint as “floating in the wrong waters” due to jurisdictional concerns.
The crux of the dispute? A March 2021 memorandum from the BOEM, which earmarked five wind energy zones, painting a picture of turbines rising from New Jersey’s Cape May, reaching out to the eastern edge of Long Island, NY, in the stretch named the New York Bight. The group’s initial outcry against the move came just before the region attracted a storm of $4.4 billion in bids for wind energy development rights.
Legal Squalls and Calm Seas
By March 2022, BOEM countered with a wave of its own, questioning the court’s authority to even entertain the suit. They argued that their memo was merely the whisper of the wind, an initial step with negligible real-world impacts. This left the advocacy group’s concerns over endangered species and environmental policies seemingly adrift without a rudder. U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich found weight in this argument, declaring the complaint as unripe and pushing it off the legal deck in March 2023.
