Jun 18, 2026
The Trump administration is not only busy issuing tariff refund checks. It’s also paying energy developers to walk away from planned wind projects and invest in fossil fuels instead.
The U.S. Department of the Interior said on Wednesday that it was paying $765 million to energy firm Invenergy to ditch their effort to build a quartet of wind farms just off the coasts of New York, California, and Maine.
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“The offshore wind leases were sold under the assumptions that taxpayers would indefinitely subsidize costly, unreliable projects and that no national security concerns were implicated - both assumptions have since been proven false,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a news release about the deal.
Under the agreement, the company will voluntarily cancel the four offshore wind leases and redirect the cash into building at least five natural gas power plants in Midwestern states, in conjunction with developing geothermal power projects in the western U.S.
Democrats denounced the deal as one that could cause Americans’ power bills to climb higher, since it blocks new power sources for the strained U.S. electric grid.
“These projects represented thousands of good union jobs, millions of homes’ worth of electricity, and billions in economic development,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
The Invenergy leases were originally sold in 2022 under the Biden administration as it carried out a concerted effort to foster a clean energy boom that relied on tax incentives. The largest of these spans 84,000 acres in the New York Bight between Long Island and New Jersey. The lease sale totaled $800 million at the time.
President Donald Trump, though, reversed course last year and has repeatedly trashed wind turbines as inefficient eyesores.
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“My goal is to not let any windmill be built. They’re losers,” he said at a White House event in January.
A $2.6-billion Trump-backed campaign against renewables
The announcement marked the latest maneuver from the Trump administration to block offshore wind development in a campaign that has totaled $2.6 billion so far.
Francesco Sassi, an energy expert and political science professor at the University of Oslo, called it a “state-engineered strategy” to steer capital towards the fossil fuel sector.
“The geoeconomics of the US power sector are being forcefully rewritten,” he said in an X post.
In March, the Trump administration struck a similar agreement with French energy company Total Energy in which it received $928 million from the federal government in exchange for shelving plans to develop wind farms off California, New Jersey and New York. The company also announced that it would channel the money into new natural gas production and exports.
The Trump administration also suspended leases for five wind projects in December that were well underway, citing national security concerns brought forward by the Pentagon. A court fight ensued and the offshore wind industry reinstated three projects at the start of the year.
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Environmentalists argue that offshore wind farms can help combat the causes of climate change. Wind turbines don’t emit harmful greenhouse gases, nor do they require a large footprint on land or sea.
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A potential legal fight to come
Earlier this month, seven Democratic-led states that include New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts, sued the Trump administration over its deal with global energy company TotalEnergies that nixed their offshore wind projects.
New York Attorney General Letitia James called it “an illegal agreement” that threatened access to affordable energy for her state.
The deal with Invenergy may draw a similar court challenge. The Trump administration, though, may continue striking these extraordinary agreements with energy companies anyway.
Department of Justice Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said her agency looks “forward to continued cooperation from companies that are reevaluating their energy investments.”
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Joseph Zeballos-Roig is a policy and politics journalist based in Washington D.C with a focus on economics. He is experienced in connecting the significance of events in the capital to the lives of everyday Americans whether its taxes, tariffs, interest rates or federal programs.
