Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices
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- Interior Department paid Invenergy $765 million to cancel four offshore wind leases off New York/New Jersey, California, and Maine; Invenergy will redirect capital to natural gas-fired projects plus some geothermal in the Western U.S.
- Interior Department paid Duke Energy $129 million on June 29 to cancel its Carolina Long Bay project, which would have generated 1.6GW — enough to power 375,000 homes — and that announcement coincided with Duke asking Carolinas customers to raise thermostats during a heat wave.
- Interior Department paid German company RWE $1.22 billion on August 6 to cancel leases in New York Bight, California, and Louisiana; in exchange, RWE gets a stake in a Louisiana liquified methane terminal and will build $300 million in methane gas turbines to power data centers.
- The deals total more than $3.9 billion drawn from the Judgment Fund — a pot reserved for settlements against the government — despite no energy company having actually filed suit, and emails reportedly show Interior decided on the bribes before inventing its national security rationale.
- A federal court blocked Interior's national security justification for slowing wind permitting on the same day the RWE deal was announced, and California has already said it will sue over the cancellations, having lost from 5 wind projects down to 2.
- U.S. electricity prices hit the highest rate ever recorded in July even as Interior kept paying companies to walk away from offshore wind capacity at a moment when grid demand is projected to grow 20–40% over the next decade.
Why it matters: Ratepayers are absorbing record-high U.S. electricity prices while over $3.9 billion in Judgment Fund money flows to companies pivoting from wind to gas and methane infrastructure — even as courts keep reversing the underlying regulatory rationale and states like California lose gigawatts of planned clean capacity.
