Colin A. Young State House News Service

BOSTON — Vineyard Wind appears to have regained its place at the front of the offshore wind project permitting line and is back on track to becoming the first utility-scale offshore wind farm in the United States.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced Wednesday afternoon that it will resume its review of the 800-megawatt wind farm planned for 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and will “proceed with development of a Final Environmental Impact Statement,” one of the last steps before the project can truly get underway. The decision could help ensure Massachusetts starts getting clean power from the project by the end of 2023.

“We’re very pleased that BOEM has decided to move forward with the permitting process for our Vineyard Wind 1 project,” a Vineyard Wind spokesperson said. “We look forward to working with the agency as we launch an industry that will create thousands of good paying jobs while also taking meaningful steps to reduce the impact of climate change.”

Following a string of permitting delays imposed on the project by the Trump administration, Vineyard Wind on Dec. 1 announced that it was pulling its project out of the federal review pipeline in order to complete an internal study on whether the decision to use a certain type of turbine would warrant changes to construction and operations plan. The Trump administration declared the federal review of the project “terminated.”

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Vineyard Wind’s decision to yank its plan from review also meant the project’s ultimate fate would not be decided under Trump, who frequently expressed concerns about wind power and held the project back while his administration looked into impacts that the burgeoning industry will have on commercial fishing.

The company said last week that its internal review determined that no changes are needed to its construction and operations plan and that “the Federal Permitting Process can be completed” by BOEM. The company said it had not had any detailed discussions with the Biden administration about how its request to resubmit its construction and operations plan would be handled.

The decision to pick up the Vineyard Wind review from where it stood just before the company withdrew its plan appears to have been among the first orders of business for Amanda Lefton, who was announced as the new director of BOEM earlier Wednesday. Before being drafted into the Biden administration, Lefton served as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s first assistant secretary for energy and environment and had previously worked for The Nature Conservancy in New York.

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