Trump Pays Energy Company $765 Million To Abandon Wind Farms And Build Gas Plants Instead, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Wind Off America's Coasts Was Still At Risk Of Becoming Free Electricity

WASHINGTON. In what the Department of the Interior described on Wednesday as a victory for American energy, the Trump administration announced it would arrange for the energy company Invenergy to receive roughly $765 million in exchange for not building four offshore wind projects, resolving a long-standing concern that the wind off America's coasts was still at risk of being turned into electricity at no cost to anyone.

Under the agreement, Invenergy will relinquish federal leases in the New York Bight, off the Central Coast of California, and in the Gulf of Maine, and will redirect an equivalent sum into natural gas-fired power plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri, along with geothermal projects across the West. Officials confirmed that the plan would replace a form of energy that produces no fuel costs and no emissions with several forms of energy that produce both.

The deal is the fourth of its kind, following earlier settlements with TotalEnergies, Bluepoint Wind, and Golden State Wind that together have steered more than $2.5 billion in offshore wind capital toward liquefied natural gas, oil, and other conventional infrastructure. Administration officials, who turned to the buyouts after federal courts repeatedly declined to let the president cancel wind projects by decree, characterized the strategy as a return to common sense.

"President Trump is committed to unleashing affordable, reliable American energy for our country's communities and putting the American people first through common-sense action," said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who added that the wind leases had depended on costly, unreliable subsidies and that the money would now flow to dependable, secure energy infrastructure. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that paying a company hundreds of millions of dollars to abandon planned power projects represented the most fiscally responsible option available.

The arrangement drew objections from New York Attorney General Letitia James, Governor Kathy Hochul, and six other states, who have sued over an earlier buyout on the grounds that the federal government cannot cancel leases through negotiated payments without following the law, and who questioned the use of public funds to dismantle the projects. The administration noted that the wind farms, had they been built, would have powered hundreds of thousands of homes, killed no detectable number of whales, and continued operating for decades, and explained that this was precisely the outcome it had spent $765 million to prevent.

At press time, the administration had announced plans to invest a further sum in locating any remaining stretches of American coastline where the breeze was still blowing unmonetized and unburdened by a power purchase agreement.