There's a moment in every New York story where you realize the people making the decisions have never actually stood on the block they're talking about.
This is one of those stories.
Two massive offshore wind projects — Empire Wind 1 and Sunrise Wind — have been under construction off the coast of Long Island for over a year. Empire Wind alone would deliver power directly into Brooklyn. Not upstate. Not through twelve middlemen. Into Brooklyn, via submarine cables running to a substation in Sunset Park — one of the most working-class, immigrant-dense neighborhoods in the five boroughs, and exactly the kind of place we show up for.
Together, these two projects were supposed to generate 1,734 megawatts of electricity. Enough for a million homes. Enough to cover roughly 10 percent of what New York City and Long Island need on a hot August afternoon when every bodega refrigerator, every restaurant reach-in cooler, every residential window unit is running at full tilt.
They were supposed to come online in 2026. They might still. But not without a fight that has already cost hundreds of millions of dollars and still isn't over.
What Got Built Before the Hammer Dropped
Equinor — the Norwegian energy company behind Empire Wind 1 — started laying rock on the ocean floor. Installed monopiles. Began running cables. By December 2025, the project was nearly 60 percent complete, with 4,000 workers active and $3.1 billion committed to the ground and sea.
Ørsted, the Danish developer behind Sunrise Wind, was running onshore cable routes through central Long Island at the same time. Their turbines would sit 30 miles east of Montauk — barely visible from shore. Power was routing underground to a substation in Holbrook.
Both projects went through more than a decade of federal permitting. Environmental impact reviews. Public comment periods. Military coordination. Coast Guard clearance. These weren't fast-tracked projects. They were among the most reviewed infrastructure builds in the country.
Then, on December 22, 2025, the Department of Interior dropped stop-work orders on both of them — along with three other East Coast offshore wind projects — citing national security risks identified in classified reports that have never been made public.
The Justification That Kept Changing
First it was radar. The Department of Interior claimed turbine blades create "clutter" that interferes with military radar systems, potentially masking real threats. The Department of Energy had previously stated that radar systems can be calibrated to compensate for this. That didn't slow the order.
Then Interior Secretary Doug Burgum added an economic argument — that offshore wind charges "over two times the local grid price." The actual contracts signed by New York's state energy authority put the all-in development cost at $150.15 per megawatt-hour, which was competitive with prevailing market rates when the deals were signed. The math didn't match the talking point.
Then it escalated to classified national security threats from the Department of Defense — threats specific enough to halt construction but apparently too sensitive to explain to the governors, the developers, the 4,000 workers, or the federal judges who later had to rule on whether the orders were legitimate.
New York didn't wait to find out. Governor Hochul's administration and the state energy authority filed two lawsuits. Attorney General Letitia James filed two more. The argument in every filing: the orders were arbitrary, lacked any reasoned explanation, and contradicted the decade of prior federal review that approved both projects in the first place.
The Courts Agreed — Five Times
By February 2, 2026, federal judges had struck down all five stop-work orders. Every project. Every time. Courts concluded the government had not demonstrated a risk so imminent that halting mid-construction was justified.
But here is the thing about winning in court that nobody tells you: you don't get the time back. You don't recover the carrying costs on stalled capital. You don't undo the crew disruptions, the supply chain gaps, the insurance adjustments, the investor calls where someone on the other end of the line starts asking questions they weren't asking six months ago. Every week a project like this sits idle is money gone — not borrowed against, not deferred, gone.
The Environmental Defense Fund said it plainly: the delays already increased construction costs, and those costs will eventually show up in consumer energy bills. The administration that claimed to be protecting New Yorkers from high energy prices created the conditions that guaranteed higher energy prices.
What This Has to Do with Your Restaurant
New York City cannot build large power generation plants inside its own boundaries. That is not a political statement — it is a physical and regulatory reality. The city depends on power coming in from outside. The infrastructure that currently does that job is aging, it runs heavy on natural gas, and it is not designed for the demand spikes that a warming city increasingly produces.
Empire Wind was specifically engineered to solve this. It would have been the first offshore wind project to deliver power directly into New York City — bypassing the grid constraints that make conventional expansion inside the five boroughs nearly impossible. Without it, and without a separate transmission project that would bring Canadian hydropower south, New York City's grid is on track to face reliability problems as early as summer 2026.
That means brownouts. Potential blackouts during peak demand hours. That is not a climate activist's projection. That is the operational assessment of people who run the grid for a living.
Now think about what a brownout does to a restaurant on a 95-degree Tuesday in August.
The reach-in coolers that hold your prep work. The walk-in that's running a $4,000 inventory. The POS system. The credit card terminals. The exhaust ventilation that keeps the kitchen from becoming a hazard. All of it tied to a grid that is walking into summer with less cushion than it should have — because two projects that were more than halfway built got stopped by an order a federal judge later said was unjustified.
The immigrant-owned restaurants we write about, the family spots in Jackson Heights and Sunset Park and Mott Haven — these are not operations with backup generators and facilities managers. These are places where a four-hour blackout is a four-hour revenue loss with a side of spoilage. That's a week of margin, gone.
The Buyout Play
If the stop-work order strategy didn't finish the job, the administration found another angle.
In late March 2026, it was announced that the federal government had agreed to pay French energy company TotalEnergies close to $1 billion to abandon two offshore wind projects — one off North Carolina and a larger one planned off the coasts of New York and New Jersey. Public money, structured as a buyout, to kill infrastructure that was in active development under valid leases.
This is what the policy looks like when the courts won't cooperate: pay the developers to walk away before it becomes another lawsuit the government loses.
Where It Stands
Empire Wind 1 is cleared to resume construction and is continuing. Equinor is moving forward. First power is now expected sometime in late 2026, full operations by end of 2027 — delayed from the original schedule, at higher cost than originally projected.
Sunrise Wind has also been cleared by the courts and is proceeding with both offshore and onshore construction. Ørsted has confirmed it is evaluating the full path forward given the disruption and added risk.
New York's grid is carrying more exposure this summer than it should. The projects will probably get built. The power will likely arrive. Later than planned, more expensive than it had to be, and with a new category of risk now embedded in every offshore wind deal that gets penciled in anywhere in the United States.
The Real Story
The food spots we cover don't have lobbyists. They don't have a line to the Department of Interior. They don't get a classified briefing when someone in Washington decides to reroute the energy infrastructure their neighborhood depends on.
What they have is a grid that either works or doesn't. A summer that either holds or breaks. A margin that can absorb a bad week or can't.
That's the actual stakes here. Not the megawatts. Not the leases. Not the court dockets.
The stakes are whether the people who built the food culture this city runs on are going to be left holding the bill for a political fight they had no part in starting — and no seat at the table to finish.
That's the state of the street.
Marco Shalma is the chief editor of New York Eats Here and founder of We Eat Here. He has spent 2 decades building food culture and community events across New York City.
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