Invenergy says Trump’s offshore wind payout will fund a geothermal push

Energy developer Invenergy is joining America’s race to build next-generation geothermal — and it plans to do so with the controversial new refund the Trump administration is giving it for abandoning offshore wind projects.

On Wednesday, the Chicago-based company struck an agreement with the Trump administration to relinquish four offshore wind leases located off the coasts of California, Maine, and New York. In exchange, the U.S. Interior Department will pay Invenergy $765 million — the total value of the leases — which the firm says it will spend on both geothermal power projects and natural gas–fired power plants instead.

The megadeveloper is the third major energy firm to strike such a deal with the devoutly anti-wind Trump administration in recent months. TotalEnergies was promised nearly $1 billion to walk away from its plans to install turbines near North Carolina and in waters off New York and New Jersey. Ocean Winds later inked agreements worth nearly $900 million to relinquish offshore wind leases on the eastern and western U.S. coasts.

Some Democratic lawmakers have characterized these deals as illegal payouts meant to push firms out of the offshore wind sector, which was once the cornerstone of decarbonization plans in the Northeast but has now been decimated by the Trump administration’s repeated attacks. Seven Democratic-led states are suing to stop one of Interior’s deals with TotalEnergies.

“We have a chance to build cheap, reliable power right off our own coasts,” Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, said in a Wednesday statement. ​“Instead this administration is paying top dollar to walk away from it, tying our energy future to the vagaries of volatile markets and handing the bill to families already paying too much.”

Invenergy defended the agreement as a way to ward off a long, protracted legal fight with an administration that’s made its position on offshore wind clear. And it frees up money for the company to invest in energy projects that it believes can be built more quickly to meet skyrocketing energy demand.

The company ​“will deploy additional capital into projects that can be delivered on a commercially reasonable timeline and meet customer demand while continuing to evaluate opportunities as market conditions evolve,” Daniel Runyan, Invenergy’s senior vice president for development, said in a statement.

While TotalEnergies and Ocean Winds also committed to investing in fossil fuels, Invenergy’s deal is the only one of the three that includes plans for carbon-free energy.

To date, the developer has built over 20 gigawatts of land-based wind energy projects and over 9 GW of solar nationwide, along with 7 GW of natural gas facilities.

While it has yet to construct a geothermal power plant, Invenergy says the payment from the Trump administration will help accelerate its first foray into the sector. The firm is planning to start early drilling work later this year on an ​“enhanced geothermal system,” according to a source familiar with the plans. This type of geothermal project — which is what Fervo Energy is developing in Utah — involves using fracking and horizontal drilling techniques to create artificial reservoirs in hot, dry rocks deep beneath the earth’s surface.

Invenergy holds 45 geothermal leases totaling about 144,000 acres on public lands in five Western states — including 5,000 acres in New Mexico that it purchased on Tuesday from Interior’s Bureau of Land Management. Last month, it joined a new coalition of Mountain West states that aims to accelerate deployment of the carbon-free energy source.

Invenergy declined to say how much of the $765 million will go toward geothermal projects specifically. The company is also planning to invest in natural gas plants in Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Wisconsin with that money.

The deal reflects the stark contrast between how the Trump administration has treated geothermal energy and offshore wind. While the government has moved to stop offshore wind in its tracks, it has greased the skids for geothermal. The sector was allowed to hang on to its tax incentives in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and a recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Energy Department has funneled four times more funding to the sector than was appropriated by Congress.

Even if the agreement does enable Invenergy to move faster on its geothermal energy ambitions, advocates still say it’s a bad deal for the regions that were banking on offshore wind.

“These buyouts are not one-for-one ​‘swaps’ for another kind of energy,” Hillary Bright, executive director of offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward, said in a Wednesday statement. ​“Replacing coastal offshore wind with geothermal or natural gas infrastructure in another region does nothing to address rising ratepayer affordability concerns, reliability challenges or potential gaps in power supply in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.”