Dive Brief:
- The state of California plans to sue the U.S. Department of the Interior and several other parties over the Trump administration’s agreements with offshore wind developers to “buy back” their leases for several projects, including Golden State Wind off the coast of California, Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a Tuesday letter.
- The buyout of the Golden State Wind lease violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, Bonta alleged, and “adversely [affects] California’s legal interest in the ‘expeditious and orderly development’ of wind energy on the Outer Continental Shelf.”
- The buyout agreements are also the subject of a lawsuit against the administration from the attorneys general for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont over Interior’s buyout deal with TotalEnergies.
Dive Insight:
California’s lawsuit follows last week’s announcement from Interior that it reached an agreement with Invenergy to pay the company $765 million to terminate four offshore wind leases belonging to its affiliates. Those lease areas include one in the New York Bight, two in the Gulf of Maine, and a lease area in Morro Bay off the central coast of California.
The lease cancellations “are causing ongoing harm to California, requiring California to take judicial action to compel compliance with OCSLA,” Bonta wrote. In a release about the state’s intent to file suit, Bonta said the cancellation “will harm the state’s clean energy and climate goals and economy. Offshore wind is expected to play a role in this plan due to its potential to generate vast amounts of electricity from strong, consistent winds off California’s coast.”
Golden State Wind’s lease area, OCS-P 0564, was also in Morro Bay and had an estimated 2 GW of installation capacity. Invenergy estimated that its Morro Bay lease area, OCS-P 0565, had around 1.5 GW in capacity.
The California Energy Commission is already investigating the deal that Golden State Wind made with the administration, and in May subpoenaed records from the project including the full terms of the agreement between the project and the Interior Department.
“Following last week’s news that DOI entered into a similar buyout deal with Invenergy, CEC issued a similar administrative investigative subpoena to Invenergy on June 23, 2026,” the attorney general’s release said. “That subpoena demands a copy of the settlement agreement — which DOI has not made public — and information concerning its basis, negotiation, and impact.”
The Trump administration previously reached settlement agreements to buy four other offshore wind leases back from the developers who purchased them. Across the eight lease areas, the administration has agreed to pay $2.5 billion, with stipulations in the agreements that the developers will commit an equal amount of money to the development of resources such as oil, gas, and geothermal.
In his letter, Bonta said the federal government had also violated OCSLA by not holding a hearing before deciding to cancel the lease; not suspending the lease for five years before cancellation; not notifying or coordinating with governors of the affected states; and not following the regulations for lease relinquishment.
“California has invested more than $100 million to support the development of wind energy off the coast of the State,” Bonta said. “These investments and the wind energy they produce would have generated economic benefits, improved grid reliability, lowered energy costs, diversified the State’s energy supply, and advanced California’s statutory clean energy and climate policy goals.”
