Turbines standing 65 strong off the Rhode Island coast sent first power to New England on a Friday night, and the farm had survived two federal orders to stop building it
On a Friday evening in mid-March, electrons from a new offshore turbine crossed 15 miles of Atlantic water and entered New England’s grid.
The moment was quiet: no visible spark, no crowd at the substation.
But the turbine that produced it had twice been ordered, by federal agencies, to stop being built.
The federal government issued its first halt order in August 2025, citing national security concerns about radar interference from turbine towers and blades.
Its farm, 65 turbines strong and rated at 704 MW, is now the first offshore wind project in the country contracted to serve two states at once.
What kept it standing through those orders?
How a stop work order becomes almost no delay at all
The federal government issued its first halt order in August 2025, citing national security concerns about radar interference from turbine towers and blades. At that point 45 of the 65 turbines were already standing in the water, and the project was roughly 80 percent complete. Developers had secured every state and federal permit, including a defense department review, years before the orders arrived.
A second stop work order followed, and two lawsuits went with it: one filed by the Danish developer behind the project, a second filed jointly by the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. A federal court issued a preliminary injunction in January 2026, allowing crews to return to the lease area and resume turbine installation.
The injunction held, and the remaining turbines went up. So the margin between a stalled farm and a powered one was, in the end, a single court ruling. Rhode Island’s governor captured the mood plainly in a statement on the night first power was delivered: “Offshore wind is part of our state’s all-of-the-above energy strategy,” he said, “one that strengthens our energy supply and supports long-term reliability for residents and businesses.”
What 65 turbines actually look like from a supply vessel
Each machine carries a hub at 436 feet above the waterline, roughly the height of a 40-story building, and its three blades sweep a circle 656 feet across. The turbines are rated at 11 MW apiece, meaning a single full rotation in a strong Atlantic gale can power several hundred homes for an hour.
Assembly happened not at sea but at State Pier in New London, Connecticut, where tower sections and nacelles arrived by ship and were joined to blades on the dock before a specialized installation vessel carried the completed sets offshore. Each vessel cycle moved only a handful of complete sets, so the installation season stretched across the better part of two years.
The farm sits in federal waters 15 miles south of Rhode Island and 32 miles offshore from the Connecticut coast, deep enough to catch steadier Atlantic winds but shallow enough for fixed steel piles. Water depth across the lease area averages around 100 feet.
The numbers behind a $4 billion farm
After twice being ordered to halt, the project completed all 65 turbines and began delivering power in March, with full commercial operation expected by the end of 2026. At that point it becomes the first offshore wind farm in US history contracted to split output between two states: 304 MW to Connecticut and 400 MW to Rhode Island, totaling 704 MW.
The $4 billion project is expected to power 350,000 homes under fixed price, 20-year agreements with utilities in both states, providing price certainty for consumers across both grids. On the labor side, more than 1,000 local union workers logged more than 2 million work hours, and the staging piers at New London, Providence and Quonset Point were rebuilt or expanded to handle the scale.
Where the politics of a stop work order left the grid exposed
The national security argument rested on a concern that spinning blades can scatter radar returns and complicate air defense tracking. That concern is real and has been studied for more than a decade, but the project’s developers noted the defense review had been completed and cleared before the orders arrived.
The timing, coming when the farm was 80 percent built and generating no power, meant ratepayers in two states were carrying the cost of a nearly complete asset sitting idle. A separate line of scrutiny asks whether sensors aboard an operating offshore farm can be compromised in ways that create a different security exposure. Researchers have flagged risks from compromised offshore wind sensors and converter stations that go beyond physical radar clutter.
None of those findings were cited in the stop work orders, but the overlap in timing has sharpened the conversation among grid operators and planners about what a 700 MW farm looks like as an attack surface. Even so, the court’s decision to allow construction to resume resolved the immediate standoff.
What New England gets and what still has to happen
The first electrons reached the grid on March 13, 2026, with the farm at 90 percent completion, and full commercial operation remains on track before year’s end. At full output, the farm will generate the equivalent of about 2.5 percent of New England’s total electric supply, a meaningful share on a grid where winter price spikes routinely reach several times the summer rate.
For a broader picture of what American vessels are doing for the offshore fleet, the 472-foot installation ship built at a Texas shipyard shows how the logistics chain is now expanding southward.
What remains to be settled is whether the legal protection that kept this farm building will hold for the projects behind it. Sunrise Wind, the largest of the next wave at 924 MW, passed the halfway construction mark in mid-2026. The court injunction that rescued this farm does not automatically extend to it, and the radar interference question has not been resolved by policy, only by litigation. The 65 turbines standing off Rhode Island are proof of what the New England grid can absorb. Whether the next farm gets the same chance to prove it is still open.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
