In a highly touted deal announced last month, US President Donald Trump paid the leading French energy developer TotalEnergies $1 billion to walk away from two leases on offshore wind areas in US waters. Why? Who knows? A sensitive matter of national security, maybe? Maybe! Security threat or not, US taxpayers are now on the hook for yet another unforced error while TotalEnergies is free to peddle its wind farms elsewhere around the world, offshore and on. Your Taxpayer Dollars At Work: Trump Buys Off Two Wind Farms On its face, the deal with TotalEnergies makes no sense except as yet another indication that Trump doesn’t just hate losing. He fears it, and the fear factor escalates with every loss. Trump has done some serious damage to the US offshore wind industry since taking office again last year. However, he has also experienced some humiliating, high profile losses. When he tried to halt construction five offshore wind farms along the Atlantic Coast, for example, a series of federal judges swiftly smacked the effort down All five wind projects are on track for completion. Trump also delayed several other Atlantic projects that were already in the development pipeline, by forcing them to submit to additional reviews. Last December, though, a federal judge ruled that the President has no authority to order any such specious re-reviews. Clearly alarmed at the potential for additional offshore wind farms to work their way through the pipeline during his time in office, Trump decided to sidestep the courts and simply buy his way out of the loser’s corner. In a highly publicized deal with TotalEnergies, last month the Interior Department announced that the firm agreed to drop its claim on two federal lease areas off the coasts of New York and North Carolina, in return for a payout of almost $1 billion. “On March 23, the Interior Department announced a payday of almost $1 billion for TotalEnergies … for nothing. The money went to guarantee that TotalEnergies will not build offshore wind farms in the US, which they were not going to build anyways, at least not anytime soon,” CleanTechnica reported that same day. US Taxpayers Lose Again To the surprise of no-one, the US Department of the Interior — which administers offshore leases through the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management — expressed the bribe as a win for US taxpayers. “This agreement is yet another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in an official press statement on March 23. “Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers. We welcome TotalEnergies’ commitment to developing projects that produce dependable, affordable power to lower Americans’ monthly bills,” he continued. Doing the math, March 23 happened barely three weeks after Trump launched his war against Iran, sending global energy markets into an upwards spiral with a ripple effect on the cost of natural gas here in the US, so it’s not clear where the lowering of monthly bills comes into the picture. In addition, ratepayers have been hit with skyrocketing bills apace with massive, expensive gas utility infrastructure upgrades in recent years, and the hurt is expected to continue regardless of TotalEnergies’s commitment to developing fossil energy projects here in the US. Follow The Money In the meantime, questions have arisen over the source of the $1 billion payoff to TotalEnergies. On April 13, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) launched an investigation into the matter. The Senator, who is the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, outlined the issues in a letter to TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné. “After losing repeatedly in federal court, it appears that President Trump has turned to another method to kill offshore wind: pay companies like yours to walk away,” Ranking Member Whitehouse wrote, zeroing in on the use of $1 billion from the Judgement Fund, a pot of money administered by the Department of Justice. Whitehouse further charged that the agreement between the Interior Department and TotalEnergies “appears to suffer from a lack of legally available or appropriated funding.” “Established in statute, the Fund exists to pay final judgements, awards, and settlements arising out of legal or administrative actions against the federal government,” Whitehouse explained, while pointing out there are no indications that TotalEnergies raised such claims or actions against US government. “Ranking Member Whitehouse also warned of possible violations of the Antideficiency Act, which ‘prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation,” Whitehouse’s office added. “No relevant bureau or office within DOI has sufficient funds to pay Total the nearly $1 billion it has been promised.” “No matter how much President Trump and his officials may claim that offshore wind is more expensive and less reliable than fossil fuel energy, those claims are simply false,” Whitehouse emphasized. Hold on to your hats. Whitehouse set a deadline of April 23 for TotalEnergies to turn over documents relating to the deal, including a written copy of the agreement along with any claims against the US government related to the wind farm leases, among other communications and explanations. A Sensitive Matter Of National Security Hold on to your hats again, because on April 9 the Interior Department slipped a notice regarding the North Carolina lease cancellation onto its website. That, too, doesn’t pass the smell test. The notice references “sensitive information that [Interior] recently learned from the Department of War.” If that rings a bell, you may be thinking of similarly sensitive information from the Department of Defense that suddenly popped up on the Interior Department’s radar last fall. The supposed emergency was so dire and immediate that Burgum abruptly and without prior notice imposed an emergency stop-work order on December 22, applying to all five under-construction wind farms. The work resumed after federal judges in all five cases determined that the claim of a national security emergency was a fantasy wrapped in a delusion. Nevertheless, Burgum has trotted out the same old excuse yet again, in a flopsweat-splattering effort to somehow show that TotalEnergies (through its North Carolina project, Carolina Long Bay), actually had a legitimate claim that it could have exercised, only it didn’t. Here’s that paragraph in full from the agency’s website (emphasis added): “After lease issuance, Carolina Long Bay and the United States, through the Department of the Interior (DOI) executed a settlement agreement on March 23, 2026. As reflected in the agreement, DOI determined that cancelling Lease OCS-A 0545 is in the public interest, and Carolina Long Bay stated that it would have asserted claims in litigation against the United States related to the lease. The agreement recognized that DOI would not have issued the lease in May 2022 had it known the sensitive information that it recently learned from the Department of War.” Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have run out, laughing all the way to the bank. On April 17, Burgum also trotted out the identical excuse in a notice of lease cancellation for Attentive Energy, which represents TotalEnergies’s offshore lease area in New York. “…Attentive Energy stated that it would have asserted claims in litigation against the United States related to the lease. The agreement recognized that DOI would not have issued the lease in May 2022 had it known the sensitive information that it recently learned from the Department of War,” the agency wrote. It’s A Big World Out There Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, TotalEnergies is off to Kazakhstan, where the company has just announced a FID (Final Investment Decision) leading to the construction of the new 1-gigawatt, 150-turbine Mirny onshore wind farm along with a 600 megawatt-hour batter energy storage system. “The project’s investment amounts to $1.2 billion, with about 75% externally financed,” TotalEnergies noted in a press statement on April 2024, taking note of EBRD, Proparco, DBK, DEG, Société Générale, QNB Group, China Construction Bank, and Standard Chartered among the investors. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s coming. In the same statement, TotalEnergies SVP Olivier Jouny reminded everyone that the new onshore wind farm will “contribute to the 9 GW renewables portfolio that we are combining with Masdar through a 50/50 joint venture across nine Asian countries, including Kazakhstan.” A TotalEnergies press release dated April 2 lists “solar, wind and battery storage projects in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Uzbekistan” targeted by the new $2.2 billion joint venture. No wonder the company willing if not eager to walk away from wind farms in the US. They are going to be plenty busy, elsewhere. Photo: The French energy firm TotalEnergies drops plans for two wind farms in the US, picks up lots more activity elsewhere around the world (cropped, courtesy of TotalEnergies,
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