New York, California ramp up fight against Trump’s offshore wind deals

NEW YORK CITY — The enormous blades and hubs of offshore wind turbines are sprawled across a waterfront lot in Brooklyn, as a yellow lifting crane named Big Benny looms overhead. The energy firm Equinor is storing components here before shipping them out to Empire Wind, a 810-megawatt installation that is set to start producing clean electricity next year.

The project will be the third of its kind to spin off the coast of New York, joining Ørsted’s completed South Fork Wind and its in-progress Sunrise Wind. What comes after that remains unclear.

The state was expecting to develop gigawatts of offshore wind to help alleviate the region’s stressed-out grid and bring down rising energy costs. But four proposed New York–area wind farms have vanished from the pipeline, after the Trump administration paid developers to abandon their federal wind leases earlier this year. Companies have similarly walked away from projects off the coasts of California, the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Maine.

But states are increasingly pushing back against the unprecedented payouts.

On Tuesday, while Climate Week NYC was in full swing, New York and seven other eastern states announced they were suing to block two agreements between developers and the U.S. Department of Interior, while California filed its own lawsuit. The states have previously sued the Trump administration over similar lease cancellations, which they say are illegal maneuvers involving nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money.

“Our job is to hold this administration accountable and not let it get in the way of our climate action progress by breaking the law,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said during an event held at the New York City Bar’s office in Manhattan.

The New York–led coalition is suing to stop Interior’s agreement with Bluepoint Wind, a joint venture of Ocean Winds and Global Infrastructure Partners. In 2022, during a record-setting auction, Ocean Winds bid $765 million for a lease area, where it planned to build a 2.4-gigawatt project near New York and New Jersey.

Last April, the Trump administration said it would reimburse the full payment and cancel the lease. In exchange, Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to invest the same amount into a U.S. liquefied natural gas facility. All the other lease-buyout deals involve some kind of commitment to reinvest the funds in fossil fuels and other energy infrastructure.

The second New York–led lawsuit targets Interior’s deals with Invenergy. This summer, the agency paid the Chicago-based developer $653 million and canceled its leases for areas near New York and New Jersey, as well as Maine. Interior also paid Invenergy $111 million to abandon its lease near California’s Central Coast — an agreement that California is now challenging.

Invenergy previously defended its agreements as a way to prevent a protracted legal fight with an administration that will seemingly stop at nothing to end offshore wind development. And the company argues it can use the freed-up funds to invest in energy projects that it believes can be built more quickly, including natural gas and geothermal. (Separately, Invenergy won federal funding this week to study geothermal technologies in Idaho.)

State attorneys general and outside legal experts argue that the lease-cancellation agreements violate several laws, including the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which requires the federal government to consult with states before taking action on offshore energy leases. Critics also claim Interior improperly dipped into the federal Judgment Fund, intended by Congress to be used to settle lawsuits, not for voluntary deals.

From New York’s perspective, a legal victory won’t immediately help fill the gigawatt-sized holes in the state’s clean energy plans, said Doreen Harris, president and CEO of the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority.

Offshore wind projects can take a decade to develop, and the Trump administration’s recent actions — including halting construction, rescinding federal tax credits, and canceling leases — have only exacerbated what were already difficult economic conditions for the fledgling renewable energy sector. As New York faces a looming power-supply crunch and reliability concerns, state leaders are considering repowering existing fossil-fuel plants and investing in new ones, Harris said.

“The reality is, even if we’re successful, the question becomes: Who is going to invest billions of dollars in energy infrastructure if this is the paradigm in which it has to be advanced?” she said at Tuesday’s Climate Week event.

Lemuel Srolovic, who heads the environmental protection bureau at the New York State Attorney General’s office, agreed that ​“winning a lawsuit doesn’t put offshore power into the grid.” But he said the efforts could still pave the way for future development by signaling to companies that states are willing to step in to defend projects.

“I think everyone would agree that a country that respects the rule of law is a better investment environment than a country that does not, and that’s in big part what these cases are about,” Srolovic said.