Two weeks after a judge reversed President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking offshore wind energy development, the White House is again suspending leases for five large projects, this time citing concerns about radar interference.
“Today’s actions address emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of associated adversarial technologies and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects near population centers on the East Coast,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement Monday.
Affected projects include Revolution Wind in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, and Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind in New York. Together, these projects will bring approximately 6 gigawatts of power generation capacity to the Eastern Seaboard region, a hotspot for data center development.
The Home Office justified the move by citing an unclassified government report (it did not say which agency prepared it or what it was connected to), along with a “recently completed classified report” from the Pentagon. The ministry said it would give the government time to work with stakeholders to address national security concerns.
The statement did not acknowledge the ongoing efforts that the government and wind power developers have made over the years to address national security concerns, particularly those related to radar.
The report the Interior Department appears to be referring to was issued by the Department of Energy in February 2024, listing a number of projects underway at the time to alleviate radar interference issues. (Other reports have been produced over the years to address similar concerns, some dating back to the former Trump administration.)
“To date, there are no mitigation techniques that can fully restore the technical performance of affected radars,” the 2024 report states. “However, the development and use of radar interference mitigation technology, and cooperation between federal agencies and between the federal government and the wind industry, has enabled federal radar agencies to continue to perform their missions without significant impact, and has also enabled the deployment of large-scale wind energy across the United States.”
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Radar interference caused by wind turbines is not new. Researchers have been studying this phenomenon for over a decade and have developed various strategies to alleviate the problem.
Wind turbines present unique challenges for radar operators.
“The movement of a wind turbine gives it a complex Doppler signal,” Nicholas O’Donoghue, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation, told TechCrunch.
Doppler refers to changes in the frequency of waves, such as radar signals, caused by moving objects. As the wind turbine blades arc, they alternately move toward and away from the radar station. Blade angle and speed can also play a role.
These, along with other considerations, “could pose difficulties in detecting targets near wind farms,” O’Donoghue said.
However, radar systems can filter out signals originating from wind farms. “The main approach is to learn the structure of wind farm interference using adaptive processing algorithms, such as spatio-temporal adaptive processing,” he said.
“Over time, the reflections from the wind farm can be processed to look for patterns that can be matched and suppressed. This process is similar to how modern adaptive noise-cancelling headphones work, although more complex.” Even objects with small radar cross sections can slip through, he noted.
Therefore, many wind farms are already being built with radar installations in mind. A 2024 Department of Energy report states, “The most basic and widely adopted mitigation method is wind farm siting, including changing the layout of proposed wind farms so that wind turbines are out of radar visibility.”
