California will sue over Trump’s latest bribe to block wind power
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- California filed a "notice of intent to sue" the Department of the Interior, targeting its $120 million April deal with Golden State Wind to scrap floating offshore wind turbines off the state's central coast in exchange for fossil fuel investment.
- Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has overseen roughly $2.6 billion in taxpayer-funded buyouts of offshore wind leases — nearly $1 billion to TotalEnergies in March, $885 million in April, and $765 million last week — to redirect development toward gas.
- California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the Trump Administration of "backroom buyouts" that make "clean-energy projects disappear," citing the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which limits the government's ability to cancel offshore leases.
- California noted it has already invested more than $100 million in offshore wind infrastructure, including harbor projects, floating wind research, and ecosystem protection — investments the OCSLA was designed to protect from federal cancellation.
- Interior has 60 days to reverse the Golden State Wind agreement before California files suit; the California Energy Commission also issued a subpoena last week to Invenergy, the company behind last week's $765 million buyout that included another California coast project, Even Keel Wind.
- Courts have already "swiftly reversed" multiple Interior attempts to pause wind projects on legality grounds, and New York previously sued over the March TotalEnergies deal on the same OCSLA and Judgment Fund claims.
Why it matters: Interior has burned through $2.6 billion in public money buying out wind leases to subsidize fossil fuel pivots — and courts have repeatedly reversed its prior blockades. California, which has sunk over $100 million of its own funds into supporting the floating offshore wind industry, is now giving Interior a 60-day window before suing under the same statute New York already invoked successfully.
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