Nearly $4 billion: that is what the Trump administration has promised energy companies to abandon offshore wind projects across the country. California and New York have now gone to court to stop it.
The two deals the states are fighting first, one with Invenergy and one with Bluepoint Wind, would send $1.4 billion in taxpayer money to those companies for projects that would be cancelled.
What the suits target
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing over the removal of an Invenergy project planned off his state’s coast. The administration said in June that it would buy back the company’s offshore wind leases tied to four projects on the East and West coasts.
New York Attorney General Letitia James led seven states in a separate challenge aimed at blocking both the Invenergy deal and a proposal involving Bluepoint Wind. Bluepoint agreed in April to halt a wind farm under development off the New York and New Jersey coast. The states in James’s suit are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont, alongside New York.
The states call the agreements unlawful. James said households would pay for them. “Americans are facing increasing energy costs because this administration would rather pay off energy companies than let us build the new power sources we need,” she said. “These illegal backroom deals take money that should have gone toward lowering New Yorkers’ bills and hand it to fossil fuel projects in other states.”
The argument is about supply. If Washington pays companies to drop projects that had already cleared approvals, the states say, they lose capacity they were counting on to meet rising electricity demand.
The politics
President Donald Trump has often attacked wind power and has said he does not want any more “windmills” built, and his administration keeps favoring fossil fuels. Offshore wind generates electricity without the carbon pollution that comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas.
Speaking at a Climate Week event in New York City, Bonta said California, as a climate leader, still finds itself in “avoidable and unnecessary battles with our own federal government” over clean energy. He said climate action has to match the “scope, speed, and scale of the problem.”
