Duke Energy has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of the Interior to surrender its undeveloped offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area in exchange for a“partial reimbursement” it will put toward other generation projects, the agency announced Monday.
A non-regulated Duke subsidiary paid $155 million for the OCS-A 0546 lease in 2022. At the time, the company said the lease created “optionality” for up to 1.6 GW of potential offshore wind energy, enough to power nearly 375,000 homes, “if the North Carolina Utilities Commission determines it’s part of the least cost path to achieve” its decarbonization goals.
On Monday, Interior said the area was “valued” at $129 million and that the utility will “reinvest that same amount in additional generating capacity to better serve its customers in the Carolinas.”
The announcement described the lease as “very early stage” and said the funds will be “redeployed to meet America’s energy demands of today and of tomorrow.”
Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, executive vice president and CEO of Duke Energy Carolinas, said in the release that the company would “refocus” nearly $129 million into “additional generating capacity, which may include advancing new nuclear and natural gas generation, and grid enhancements to strengthen reliability, support continued growth in the Carolinas and keep costs as low as possible.”
The OCS-A 0546 lease area is the ninth offshore wind lease area the Trump administration has struck an agreement to buy back. Across the nine lease areas, the administration has agreed to pay more than $2.6 billion, but is stipulating that the companies use the recovered funding for specific projects — such as oil, gas and geothermal.
The administration is facing lawsuits from eight states over the buyback deals. California announced its plans to sue on June 23, and the attorneys general for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont filed suit June 2.
In Interior’s release, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that offshore wind farms pose a “national security concern.” That assertion has been successfully challenged in court by developers of offshore wind projects who won injunctions against the Trump administration’s stop-work orders.
The National Resources Defense Council criticized the announcement in a Monday release, saying, “The Trump administration is wasting our money paying companies not to produce energy.”
