By William Opalka

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a request to halt a federal lease of waters off Long Island for an offshore wind site (16-cv-2409).

Nine commercial fishing organizations and businesses and coastal towns in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts sought an injunction in December to halt the lease even before the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management awarded it to Norwegian company Statoil. The company won the rights to the 80,000-acre New York Wind Energy Area with a $42.5 million bid.

The fishing groups said the lease would cause irreparable harm to fishing areas that produce scallops and squid; the municipalities cited “economic and natural resource interests” in the site.

“To meet the standard for irreparable harm, plaintiffs must present sufficient evidence that the purported injury is certain, great, actual, imminent, and beyond remediation. Plaintiffs have failed to do so,” D.C. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan wrote. “Most significantly, plaintiffs have not shown that their purported injuries are imminent or certain.”

BOEM conducted an environmental assessment of the lease area. The plaintiffs claim the bureau, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

“Plaintiffs’ only argument for why there is an imminent and irreparable harm, despite construction being years away if it happens at all, is that once the lease is issued, Statoil will have made a significant financial investment in the development of a wind facility and will have attained some ‘property rights’ in the ocean area, meaning the balance of harms for whether to issue an injunction later in this case will have changed,” the judge explained. “In the court’s view, this factor does not weigh strongly enough to create an imminent harm sufficient to warrant preliminary injunctive relief. The court maintains its authority to ultimately enjoin the lease in this litigation if necessary. Moreover, Statoil’s decision to invest in this lease is already made with full awareness that its proposals for a wind facility may be rejected and it may never construct or operate such a facility.”

The lease is one of the linchpins of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to develop 2.400 MW of offshore wind facilities off Long Island by 2030. (See 90-MW Wind Farm OK’d off Long Island.)