US gives French firm $1B to quit wind farms

What happened

The Trump administration on Monday agreed to pay France’s TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to forgo its leases to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government would reimburse TotalEnergies as the company invested in natural gas and oil projects in the U.S. Under the “innovative agreement,” the Interior Department said in a press release, TotalEnergies also “pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.”

Who said what

The deal to abandon the two wind projects, which would have powered more than 1.3 million homes and businesses, “is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels” and “throttling” clean energy, The New York Times said. President Donald Trump has “personally reviled” windmills for years, CNN said.

Burgum argued that offshore wind was “unreliable, unaffordable and unsecured” because the wind doesn’t always blow. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Trump’s “pay-not-to-play scheme” was “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars.” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) said it was “ludicrous and wasteful” to “pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.” TotalEnergies made the “pragmatic” business decision now that developing “offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest,” CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a statement.

What next?

One of the five East Coast wind farms Trump tried and failed to stop last year, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, “started delivering power to the grid for Virginia” on Monday, The Associated Press said. And as Trump is “boosting oil, gas and coal” in the U.S., “globally the offshore wind market is growing, with China leading the world in new installations.”