The U.S. Department of the Interior on Wednesday announced it reached an agreement to pay Invenergy $765 million to terminate four offshore wind leases belonging to its affiliates, bringing the administration’s total number of lease buyouts to eight at a cost of more than $2.5 billion.
Invenergy will “voluntarily terminate” the leases, Interior said. They are in the New York Bight, the Gulf of Maine, and in Morro Bay off the central coast of California. The project that Invenergy and partner energyRE were building in the New York Bight, the 2.4-GW Leading Light Wind, was cancelled in November due to economic and regulatory pressures.
The other lease areas — two in the Gulf of Maine and one in Morro Bay — represented a potential 4.8 GW in wind power capacity.
Invenergy will redirect the $765 million “towards other domestic energy sources … including the development of natural gas-fired power plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri and geothermal power generation projects in the Western U.S.,” Interior said.
This aligns with the other agreements Interior has made to buy out offshore wind leases. Interior plans to pay $928 million to TotalEnergies in exchange for it relinquishing of two leases and investing those funds into “the development of Train 1 to 4 of [the] Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas” and the development of “upstream conventional oil in Gulf of America and of shale gas production.”
Interior has framed these deals as settlement agreements that can be paid out from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Judgment Fund. The Trump administration is facing a lawsuit from the attorneys general of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont over its buyout agreement with TotalEnergies.
“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.
Groups including the Sierra Club and the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters criticized the announcement of the new agreement. NJLCV interim Executive Director Allison McLeod said in a release that the deal displayed a “blatant disregard for what’s legal” from President Donald Trump. In a Sierra Club release, Senior Advisor Nancy Pyne called the agreements “shady backroom deals.”
