By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, April 21 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from enforcing a series of permitting policies that wind and solar energy industry groups say have stymied the development of new energy generation projects.
Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston issued a preliminary injunction sought by nine advocacy groups and industry trade associations that argued the administration had imposed unlawful roadblocks that have halted the development of wind and solar energy projects nationwide.
The judge said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing the U.S. Department of Interior and other agencies adopted a series of unlawful policies that had led to renewable energy developers canceling or delaying numerous wind and solar projects nationwide.
Her ruling applies to members of the plaintiff organizations, which include RENEW Northeast and Alliance for Clean Energy New York. A lawyer for the groups did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Interior Department also did not respond to a request for comment.
The ruling was the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to the Trump administration’s efforts to block federal approvals for wind energy projects or stop work on multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast.
The Republican president has sought to boost government support for fossil fuels and maximize their output in the United States, the world’s top oil and gas producer, after campaigning for the presidency on the refrain of “drill, baby, drill.”
Trump on Monday invoked the Defense Production Act as he signed a series of energy-related presidential memorandums aimed at further boosting production of oil, coal and natural gas, citing the need for “defense readiness.”
Groups supporting wind and solar power sued in December, seeking to block government actions they said placed wind and solar technologies into what one of their lawyers described as a “regulatory second-class status.”
Those actions included a policy the Interior Department adopted in a July memorandum that requires nearly every step in the wind and solar permitting process to receive approval from three senior political appointees, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
The memorandum cited directives and orders Trump had signed aimed at blocking offshore wind development and directing the Interior Department to eliminate “preferences” for “expensive and unreliable energy sources like wind and solar.”
The plaintiffs argued the policy created a bottleneck that ground permitting to a halt and was adopted without any explanation for why it was needed, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, agreed, saying none of the directives the department cited explained or justified the three-tiered review process.
She also blocked policies the plaintiffs said disfavor energy projects that are “capacity dense,” as wind and solar ones would be deemed, and the Interior Department’s adoption of an interpretation of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act that imposes stricter standards for offshore wind projects.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, David Gaffen and Bill Berkrot)
