US Government Halts Major Offshore Wind Construction Citing Fears of Radar Interference

In a move that has sent shock waves through the offshore wind business, the Trump Administration has ordered a pause in the leases of five turbine projects under construction. Affecting large industrial parks off the US East Coast, the building pause has been ordered due to national security radar interference risks that are said to have been identified by the Department of War in recent classified reports. The growing problems of radar interference have been known for some time so it is hardly a surprise that the wind-despising US Government has acted on the threat. Meanwhile, the UK is currently run by wind farm fanatics and the Government was recently forced to spend £1.5 billion on vital air defence systems to mitigate ‘clutter’ corruptions caused by increasingly large offshore turbines blades.

Large wind turbines cause Doppler effects that can create false targets for radar. The possible corruption of the tracking of approaching enemy threats is a real and growing military concern, but the general clutter can also affect civil coastal surveillance, air traffic control and even meteorological observations. A real worry is that there does not appear to be a simple, inexpensive fix. To keep the Net Zero fantasy flying, the British Government has been forced to spend 2.5% of the annual defence budget to try to fix the problem with a number of experimental solutions.

With President Trump in charge, the Americans are less inclined to be so generous with taxpayers’ money. Announcing the move, the Government said its action “ensures that national security risks posed by offshore projects are appropriately addressed and the United States’ Government retains its ability to effectively defend the American people”. New information on wind farm radar risk might be contained in the classified files, but it is interestingly that a 2024 Department of Energy report is said to have noted a radar’s threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce clutter, “but an increased detection threshold could cause the radar to ‘miss actual targets’”. In other words, trying to eliminate clutter also runs the danger of taking out vital life or death information.

There is now considerable political risk in building wind farms in America, with Ørsted’s share price plunging around 14% following news of the East Coast pause. Overall, the largest wind farm operator in the world has lost about 60% of its value in the last 12 months.

With no definitive solution to hand, the radar problem in territories like the UK will only get worse. Bigger blades and political demands for more wind energy inevitably mean more radar clutter. To date, mitigating ‘solutions’ include computer fixes, radar upgrades, alternative sensors and the use of specialised manufacturing materials. Alas, none of the fixes are proven to fully eradicate the growing problem. Coming down the track in the future are floating wind turbines, which further complicate radar tracking due to positional variability.

In the worse-case basis, Britain may need a secondary backup by a costly transfer of clutter-corrupted ground facilities to the air. Professor Justin Bronk is a leading expert on air power and technology and he recently noted that unless there was a “breakthrough” in mitigating the effect of wind turbines on ground-based radar, “Britain is going to need a more capable airborne detection service”. This should not surprise. Having a reliable back-up system available at enormous expense is a regular feature of many Net Zero policies.

It has been a very bad year for the windmills. Inconvenient facts have been popping up everywhere, although the Net Zero fixated mainstream media almost invariably turn a blind eye. It has recently become obvious that the Amazon rainforest is being looted for balsa wood, an important core ingredient of turbine blades, following the decimation of sustainable plantations. Such is the demand for the strong but extraordinarily lightweight wood, it is estimated that at least 50% of the world’s balsa demand is currently being supplied by illegal logging in virgin rainforest.

If this scandal troubled the consciences of the 50,000 people attending the recent COP30 in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém, their concerns failed to make their way into the public prints. But then trees cut down to assuage the mythical climate crisis don’t seem to count, as evidenced by the 100,000 mature specimens that were destroyed to build an eight-mile highway to carry delegates to and from the conference airport.

Bats and birds don’t seem to count for much either when humans try to fiddle with the weather. Millions are killed around the world every year by fast-revolving skyscraper-high blades and few green activists care. It is not uncommon to hear the excuse that bats and birds are more at risk from climate change, an unproven suggestion that is simply beneath contempt. A fiscally incontinent British government is prepared to spend £100 million on a 1,000 metre bat protection tunnel on the new high-speed railway from London to Birmingham, but stays silent on the avian windmill scandal. Elsewhere, evidence grows of the widespread ecological damage caused by wind turbines. A recent paper published in Science found massive ecological effects cascading through the waters around offshore wind parks. Not only did such installations increase sea and atmospheric temperatures but they reshaped the upper ocean by destabilising marine food supplies.

In the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy world, bats and eagles don’t matter a flying flamingo. But national security trumps all. Popularist governments-in-hoping such as Reform in the UK present a clear political risk to the financial wellbeing of the wind energy business. Efforts to bodge together some fix to the radar problem are likely to continue in the next couple of years, whatever the financial cost.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.