President Trump has long been a critic of offshore wind power projects, claiming that the massive windmills that produce electricity are ugly, inefficient and “driving whales crazy.” Now his administration is paying a French energy company nearly $1 billion to abandon its plans to build two wind farms off the East Coast.
On Monday, the Interior Department announced that it would pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon its rights to build wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean off New York and North Carolina. The energy company, headquartered in Paris, France, won those rights in an auction held during the Biden administration, paying $928 million for the leases.
Under the terms of the deal, TotalEnergies will also invest roughly the same amount of money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including the Rio Grande LNG project, a major export facility for liquid natural gas under construction in Port of Brownsville, Texas.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum celebrated the agreement while underlining the administration’s stance. “Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers,” he said.
Others, though, raised questions about the TotalEnergies deal. Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer of The New York Times noted that the agreement is highly unusual. “The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power,” they wrote. “It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican from New York who generally supports Trump, was sharply critical, saying, “It sounds like a colossal waste of taxpayer money.”
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who also represents New York, called the plan a “corrupt giveaway to the fossil fuel industry.”
Noting that Trump has tried to kill wind farms multiple times through legal maneuverings, Schumer said he is now using public funds to accomplish his goal. “After failing five times in federal court, President Trump is now ludicrously proposing to waste $1 billion in taxpayer money to kill a wind farm off the coast of New York that would boost energy supply, help lower costs and create thousands of good-paying union jobs,” Schumer said.