In August, the Trump administration halted construction on Revolution Wind, a $4 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island that is 80 percent complete. Since then, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the project developers have filed lawsuits challenging the decision in federal court.
Revolution Wind is expected to generate 700 megawatts of electricity, which Benitz described as “an enormous amount of power.” The project would provide enough energy for 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut, at a time when Rhode Island contains about 400,000 households, she said on the Rhode Island Report podcast.
“It means so much,” Benitz said of the project. “We are relying on this power coming online in 2026, and so the system operators have already established a power purchase agreement with Revolution Wind.”
The regional power transmission organization, ISO New England, has warned that delaying Revolution Wind will “increase risks to reliability” for the New England’s power grid. “Beyond near-term impacts to reliability in the summer and winter peak periods, delays in the availability of new resources will adversely affect New England’s economy and industrial growth, including potential future data centers,” it said in statement.
ISO New England is “a very nonpolitical entity,” Benitz said. “So to see them step up with a statement is really telling, compelling, and troubling.”
Rhode Island Energy has signed an agreement to buy power from Revolution Wind at a fixed price of 9.8 cents per kilowatt hour — a rate that Benitz described as “excellent.”
“That number is below any rate that I’ve paid on a power bill in the last year, so it’s really excellent,” she said. “Onshore wind is the cheapest kind of power to produce, hands down.” But the cost of offshore wind “can come down precipitously” if the nation continues building wind farms, she said.
Also, Benitz said losing Revolution Wind would prevent Rhode Island from complying with the Act on Climate, a 2021 law which makes the state’s goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions mandatory and enforceable. It calls for net zero emissions by 2050.
“When we look at a state like ours, it’s heavily populated,” she said. “There just isn’t much space to build new projects, whether that be a solar farm, a wind farm, or even developing new natural gas power plants.”
So offshore wind is Rhode Island’s “best ally,” Benitz said. “We can develop offshore, where there is space. The resource also is excellent offshore. The wind blows stronger, it blows more consistently. We can harness much better wind energy offshore than we can onshore.”
The region is already seeing more severe heat waves in the summer and “crazier” weather, Benitz said. “Climate change is real,” she said. “We need reliable power. And we need power, too, that’s not damaging to the environment, because we’re further fueling this climate change disaster by continuing to burn fossil fuels left and right.”
Earlier this year, Trump halted construction on another US offshore wind farm, Equinor ASA’s Empire Wind, but reversed course after claiming it reached a deal that could allow new natural gas pipelines to be built in New York State.
On social media, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, blasted the Trump administration for halting Revolution Wind, and said he’s “been waiting for the phone to ring with the ransom demand.” But, he wrote, “Maybe this is attempted murder, not extortion, and there will be no demand.”
Benitz said the Trump administration might be trying to both extract a concession or scuttle the wind industry. “Maybe they’re going to see what works first or best,” he said. “They absolutely are trying to kill the wind industry in the US, though that’s been very clear regardless of this stop-work order.”
Meanwhile, other countries, such as Norway, Denmark, and China, have been developing offshore wind power for decades, Benitz said.
“It’s almost an embarrassment that we’re so far behind,” she said. “We have the technology, we have the expertise from an engineering perspective and from a blue-collar worker perspective, to do this. And so there’s no reason that we should be lagging behind our peers across the globe.”
Benitz also talked about RWU’s KidWind project, in which local fourth-graders have built model wind turbines and come to the Bristol campus to test them in a wind tunnel while meeting practicing engineers from the wind industry.
The Rhode Island Report podcast is produced by The Boston Globe Rhode Island in partnership with Roger Williams University.To get the latest episode each week, follow the Rhode Island Report podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcasting platforms, or listen in the player above.