After winning unanimous court rulings in recent weeks overturning construction shutdowns ordered by the Trump administration. East Coast offshore wind megaprojects and their political supporters are mounting new efforts, including permitting reform legislation, to fend off further federal legal attacks as the projects reach key completion and energy delivery milestones.
But the government is also apparently weighing a new approach to curtailing offshore wind, offering developer TotalEnergies a buyout to cover its costs of existing ocean site leases if it agrees not to develop projects, according to reports and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Legal rulings keep projects moving forward
Earlier this month, the same federal judge who in January rejected the administration’s late-2025 order to shut down construction of the $5.5 billion, 810 MW Empire Wind project, ruled against the government’s new attempt to extend the stop-work order beyond its original March 22 expiration, after which legal challenges are barred. “The government’s concern about possible future actions is too speculative, at this stage, for considerations of judicial economy to weigh in its favor,” said US District Court Judge Carl Nichols in Washington, DC.
The U.S. Department of the Interior also wants to shut down an extension of the $6 billion, 704 MW Revolution Wind project between Rhode Island and Connecticut, which another D.C. District Court judge has yet to rule on.
The administration also pushed last month to appeal to a federal appeals court in Boston a lower court ruling that overturned a freeze on offshore wind that President Donald Trump announced in a January 2025 executive order. That decision came in a lawsuit against the order by 17 states and the District of Columbia. Trump officials say a “thorough assessment” of the project’s national security and economic impacts is needed.
While courts have yet to rule on the merits of lawsuits against the project’s stop orders by developers and some state officials, observers speculate that the judges’ strong statements in their emergency restraining orders against government actions so far indicate that the administration may not be able to win the new cases.
There is also pressure on Capitol Hill to delay fossil fuel permitting reforms sought by the administration unless it halts its legal attacks on offshore wind. Trump has said these reforms are necessary to increase the power supply for the growing artificial intelligence sector.
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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (DR.I.), a supporter of offshore wind, has warned the administration that continued appeals and legal attacks will undermine efforts to allow reform legislation to pass. “We are looking at these [legal efforts] and would consider any appeal inconsistent with further progress to allow reform,” he told Politico’s E&E News.. Whitehouse is the most senior Democrat on the key Environment and Public Works Committee.
Meanwhile, Revolution Wind recently announced it had begun supplying power to the New England power grid, while 800 MW Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts said it had completed construction of the last of its 62 turbines. The project has been delivering up to 550 MW of power since last year.
The Trump administration is offering to buy the foreclosed wind leases
According to the New York Times, unnamed “senior administration officials” have drawn up settlement agreements that, if signed, would bring nearly $928 million to TotalEnergies, the French energy company that has already invested in offshore wind project sites in New York state and North Carolina to cover development costs so far.
Under the terms of the settlement reviewed by the Times, the administration would cancel leases in federal waters for two TotalEnergies projects: Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay, with a total payment of $928 million to the company that would reimburse its bid costs for the sites won in the 2022 Biden-era auctions.
The projects were supposed to start generating power in the early 2030s, but had been halted in November 2024 by TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné after Trump’s election. The CEO said, however, that the projects could be built under a new president.
TotalEnergies would receive $795 million for the Attentive Energy investment and about $133 million to cover Carolina Long Bay, the Times said. Both were finished in the early 2030s.
In exchange, TotalEnergies would not build the projects and would commit to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas, but without specifying any total spending or project locations.
“It’s quite unusual for the administration to make this kind of cash outlay, apparently just because Trump doesn’t like offshore wind,” a former Interior Department lawyer told the Times. A spokesman for TotalEnergies declined to comment to the Times on whether it will sign the deal. The agencies also declined to comment.
Neither the settlement documents nor the Times reports indicate whether other potential payments are under consideration, but German renewable energy developer RWE, which also halted its U.S. offshore wind projects after the election, has also said it would seek federal reimbursement for its site investments if the administration blocks its projects. The company paid a record $1.1 billion in 2022 for a large site off the coast of New York and New Jersey for a planned 2.8GW development with National Grid.
“I would say the US administration is aware of the investment protection issue,” RWE CEO Markus Krebber said at a recent company quarterly earnings briefing. “If we ever get the right to build the plants, I guess we’ll recover the money we’ve already paid. And if necessary, through legal action.”
