Seven states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday, alleging that the administration acted outside of its powers when it reached a March agreement with TotalEnergies to pay the company $795 million in exchange for the cancellation of its 3-GW Attentive Energy wind project offshore New York.
TotalEnergies also agreed to cancel its 1.2-GW Carolina Long Bay project in exchange for a $133 million reimbursement. As part of its agreement with the administration, the company said it would redirect those funds toward the development of U.S. gas and power production and exports.
“No statute authorizes Federal Defendants to use a sham settlement agreement to unlawfully cancel an offshore wind lease and redirect the money paid for the lease to a separate, unauthorized use favored by the President,” the lawsuit said.
The attorneys general for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont filed the suit. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Department of the Interior and Department of Justice are listed as defendants. TotalEnergies subsidiary Attentive Energy is listed as an interested party.
The plaintiffs argue that while the administration framed the cancellation as a settlement agreement that could be paid out from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, it doesn’t count as one under the federal law concerning that fund, as it is “not the result of a compromise settlement between adverse parties … rather an agreement resulting from Interior Defendants’ pretextual national security concerns and TotalEnergies’ desire to receive unauthorized compensation for an expensive offshore wind lease.”
“The parties to the Settlement Agreement were effectively on the same side,” the lawsuit states. “TotalEnergies first approached Interior to propose that Interior cancel the Lease so that TotalEnergies could receive a refund. Indeed, TotalEnergies’ chief executive officer asserted that that Agreement ‘came from us—we took the initiative.’”
The agreement reached between the administration and TotalEnergies would “harm New York’s energy, economic, and environmental and public health interests. Further, New York has significant reliance interests in the Lease,” the lawsuit states, arguing that New York was relying on Attentive Energy to be developed as part of its state goals for “grid reliability and energy diversification, economic growth, and climate goals and environmental and public health.”
Shortly after the Trump administration announced the first lease buyout agreement with TotalEnergies, it reached the same agreement with the Bluepoint Wind project offshore New York and the Golden State Wind project offshore California, potentially cancelling around 4.4 GW of capacity between the two projects.
The cancellation of both Attentive Energy and Bluepoint Wind would “reduce available energy production in the New York Bight by 28%,” the lawsuit states. “The settlement agreements that facilitated these Lease cancellations also serve as a blueprint for other offshore wind leaseholders to receive compensation for the cancellation of their leases, an appealing prospect for project developers that have obligations to shareholders and that are unable to make progress on projects as a result of the Trump Administration’s opposition to wind energy.”
