By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, June 1 (Reuters) - A Massachusetts judge on Monday declined to lift an order that forced turbine supplier GE Vernova to continue work on the largest offshore wind farm in New England or to send its dispute with the $4.5 billion project's developer, Vineyard Wind, into arbitration.
Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp in Boston ruled that nothing had changed since he issued the injunction in April and that Vineyard Wind was contractually allowed to pursue its legal
dispute in court in order to obtain urgent relief.
The judge had issued a preliminary injunction requiring GE Vernova to continue work at the behest of Vineyard Wind, which sued GE Vernova after a subsidiary of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company sent it a notice threatening to terminate their agreement because it had not been paid $360 million.
Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Spain's Iberdrola and Denmark's Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, argued that if GE was allowed to walk away and stop servicing the 806-megawatt project's 62 turbines, it would threaten its commercial viability.
GE Vernova has appealed Krupp's April injunction. But it also asked Krupp to reconsider it and send the case to arbitration, saying recent announcements by Vineyard Wind and state officials describing the wind farm as essentially complete showed it would not be irreparably harmed if GE exited the project.
But Krupp said those announcements did not change the fact that the project depends on GE's "expertise and proprietary know-how to bring the turbines up to operational capacity." Letting GE and its more than 200 employees and subcontractors walk off the job would jeopardize the project's financing, he said.
GE Vernova in a statement said it was proud of its work on the project and that it had the contractual right to terminate its agreements for non-payment. "We look forward to next steps," the company said.
Vineyard Wind did not respond to a request for comment.
Vineyard Wind's project off the coast of Martha's Vineyard began initial operations in February, after the developer convinced a federal judge a month earlier to block President Donald Trump's administration from halting construction.
The developer argues it is entitled to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from GE Vernova's GE Renewables US LLC unit after one of the turbine blades in 2024 collapsed and fell into the waters off Nantucket.
That blade failure caused two years of delays after the manufacturing flaw that led to the failure was found to be widespread, requiring other blades to be replaced, Vineyard Wind says.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
