NEW YORK CITY — The enormous blades and hubs of offshore wind turbines are sprawled across a waterfront lot in Brooklyn, as a yellow lifting crane named Big Benny looms overhead. The energy firm Equinor is storing components here before shipping them out to Empire Wind, a 810-megawatt installation that is set to start producing clean electricity next year.

The project will be the third of its kind to spin off the coast of New York, joining Ørsted’s completed South Fork Wind and its in-progress Sunrise Wind. What comes after that remains unclear.

The state was expecting to develop gigawatts of offshore wind to help alleviate the region’s stressed-out grid and bring down rising energy costs. But four proposed New York–area wind farms have vanished from the pipeline, after the Trump administration paid developers to abandon their federal wind leases earlier this year. Companies have similarly walked away from projects off the coasts of California, the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Maine.

On Tuesday, while Climate Week NYC was in full swing, New York and seven other eastern states announced they were suing to block two agreements between developers and the U.S. Department of Interior, while California filed its own lawsuit. The states have previously sued the Trump administration over similar lease cancellations, which they say are illegal maneuvers involving nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money.

“ Our job is to hold this administration accountable and not let it get in the way of our climate action progress by breaking the law,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said during an event held at the New York City Bar’s office in Manhattan.

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