Paying to Disappear the Wind 🌬️
Paying to Disappear the Wind
A US federal judge told the administration it could not ban offshore wind. So the administration bought the wind out instead. The bill, so far, is $2.5 billion of public money, and the only thing built is a gas terminal in Texas.
Start with the part that sounds invented. The United States government is spending $2.5 billion to make energy stop existing. Not to build a power station. To unbuild four of them, before a single turbine turned.
Here is how a policy arrives at that. In December a federal judge vacated the executive order that tried to halt offshore wind. The order was unlawful, the court found, arbitrary and capricious. The administration lost. It chose not to appeal. It changed the verb. It stopped blocking wind and started buying it out.
The structure has the tidy logic of a confidence trick. A developer agrees to walk away from its offshore lease. It promises to put the money into oil, gas and LNG instead. The Treasury then refunds the lease, dollar for dollar. The public pays for the lease the first time, at auction. The public pays for it a second time, to make it vanish. Two payments out. Nothing built.
You pay for the lease. Then you pay again to cancel it. The wind farm was never the point.
The refund comes from the Judgment Fund. That is the Treasury reserve kept for settling lawsuits against the government, the litigation it loses or is about to lose. There was no lawsuit here. No imminent suit anyone can point to. There was a president who does not like wind, and a fund that does not ask questions.
Four companies took the cheque. They are worth naming, because complicity in something this expensive should carry a name.
| Developer | Public Money |
| TotalEnergies | $928M |
| Invenergy | $765M |
| Bluepoint Wind | $765M |
| Golden State Wind | $120M |
Eight leases surrendered. More than $2.5 billion committed.
TotalEnergies is a French oil major, and it did not even feign reluctance. Its share is bound for the Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas, with the rest poured into Gulf oil and shale gas. The others scatter their money into gas plants across Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. Each of them knows it is being paid to abandon the thing it was built to do. None of them appears to mind. A pragmatic billionaire will take a cheque to walk away from a wind farm, provided the cheque clears.
Hold still on one of the surrendered leases. The New York Bight site would have powered close to a million homes. It carried $10 billion in projected savings for New York ratepayers, $500 million of that set aside for low-income households. All of it cancelled. The money that cancelled it went to a French company, headed for a gas terminal in Texas.
Seven states have sued. New York leads, with New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont behind it. Their case is narrow and unkind. The Judgment Fund had no judgment to pay. The Interior Department skipped the hearing the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act requires before a lease can be cancelled. The filing calls the deal a "sham settlement agreement", built to satisfy one man's objection to wind. The administration says the deal was reviewed by the Justice Department and cleared the right process. A court will decide which version holds.
Her phrase has stuck, and the buyout is no longer a single episode. The Sierra Club's Nancy Pyne calls the agreements "shady backroom deals". One industry figure, speaking anonymously, said the deals "may not even be legal". RWE, another developer, is reported to be weighing an exit of its own. A separate coalition of environmental groups has gone to federal court in Oregon over what it calls a de facto freeze on new wind. The buyout began as one deal with one French company. It is turning into a machine.
The official story is thrift. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says offshore wind is too costly and leans on subsidies, and that the money is moving back to power that lowers bills. The states reply that the cancelled wind would have cut bills, not raised them, and steadied a grid bracing for soaring demand. The sums are disputed and will be fought over in court.
The quieter problem is the swap itself. Each deal requires the developer to put an equal amount into oil and gas. Yet some of what now counts as the replacement was already being built. Invenergy's gas plants in Indiana and Wisconsin were announced months before the buyout was signed. As Heatmap News observed, nothing guaranteed the firms would not have spent the same money on the same projects regardless. Hillary Bright of Turn Forward put it plainly: these were not "one-for-one swaps". The public money is meant to redirect investment. In places it is paying for investment that was happening anyway.
One detail the press releases hurry past. Part of Invenergy's redirected money goes not to gas but to geothermal, which is emissions-free. So in at least one corner of its own deal, the administration has paid a company to abandon clean energy and build different clean energy, while announcing a triumphant return to fossil fuels. The story does not survive contact with its own paperwork.
Now widen the frame, because this is where the second desk files. While Washington spent the spring paying developers to pull turbines out of the water, China put the largest single-unit floating turbine ever built into it. Sixteen megawatts, off Yangjiang in Guangdong, anchored in water too deep to bolt anything to the seabed.
The turbine is not a stunt. It is the visible edge of a lead that has widened for eight years running. China now holds about 56 per cent of the world's installed offshore wind, 52 gigawatts of a global 92. Last year it built 78 per cent of everything new that went into the water. By 2030 it expects to pass 100 gigawatts and supply close to half the planet's offshore capacity. Rystad Energy, the analysts, frame the American position not as a slowdown but as a forfeit. The United States, having cancelled eight leases this spring, is leaving the field rather than placing in it. One country is building the industry. The other is paying to walk out of it.
Which returns us to the question the Chief asked, halfway off his chair. Has the United States just won its trade war with China? In a sense, yes. It has removed itself from the contest. You cannot lose a race you decline to run, and you cannot be overtaken once you have sawn off your own leg at the start. China was not consulted. It floated its turbine, went looking for the next frontier, and did not notice a contest had taken place.
Napoleon tried this once. Blockade the thing you dislike, starve it out, win by subtraction. The Continental System bankrupted the blockader, not the blockaded. History does not repeat. It does send invoices.
$2.5 billion, and the only thing built is a gas terminal in Texas. Read it twice. It does not improve.
🌡️ The Heat Is On. Filed jointly by the North American and Chinese desks, because neither could believe it alone.