I was going to say that one of the craziest things Trump has done as president is cancel billions of dollars of wind power leases and pay off companies to not build wind farms. But then, yeah, it quickly hit me this isn’t even close to one of the craziest things he’s done. But that doesn’t mean we should normalize it and that we shouldn’t highlight how ridiculous and crazy these actions were. Paying companies billions of dollars to not build clean power is truly ridiculous and insane — or just ridiculous and corrupt, take your pick. Well, California has also decided that it’s illegal and worth suing over. “California on Friday sued the Trump administration and an offshore wind developer over a deal that canceled a planned project off the state’s Central Coast in exchange for a $120 million federal reimbursement and a commitment to invest in fossil fuel projects,” Reuters reports. “California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the northern district of California against the U.S. Department of the Interior and Golden State Wind, arguing the April agreement violated federal law and should be invalidated.” Sounds good to me. Aside from being ridiculous, this policy of paying off companies to not build clean power has seemed illegal to me from the beginning. In this case, we’re talking about a floating wind power project off the coast of California that was supposed to be built by Golden State Wind. “The state said Interior unlawfully used $120 million in taxpayer funds to reimburse Golden State Wind for relinquishing an offshore wind lease it purchased in a 2022 federal auction.” By the way, Golden State Wind sounds like a homegrown California company, but it’s actually a company formed by the UK’s Reventus Power (an investment firm focused completely on offshore wind power) and Ocean Winds, which itself was created by French energy giant ENGIE and Portuguese powerhouse EDP Renewables. The wind farm Golden State Wind was planning to build was supposed to be a massive two-gigawatt floating wind farm, and the company was going to expend $30 million for workforce training, for supply-chain development, and for other community benefits. So, aside from it being harmful in terms of taxpayer costs, air quality, the climate, and utility ratepayer costs, this decision by the Trump administration meant economic harm for California. Thousands of jobs that were going to be created by the project won’t be created by it, $100 million of investments in the state won’t be made. Whether California will get anywhere with this lawsuit, especially with the current makeup of the Supreme Court if the case ever gets there, well, I’m not holding my breath, but I hope we will have some good news down the road at some point on this.