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, with Invenergy required to redeploy capital into natural gas projects (with a smaller geothermal carve-out).
- Interior struck a separate $129 million deal with Duke Energy on June 29 to cancel the 1.6 GW Carolina Long Bay wind project, which would have powered 375,000 homes in the Carolinas.
- The three deals so far this year — a ~$1B TotalEnergies buyout in March, an $885M April deal, and the Invenergy agreement — total over $2.7 billion, paid through the Judgment Fund, a pool normally reserved for court settlements against the government.
- Doug Burgum, the Interior Secretary, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry and previously cut off 400,000 homes worth of power, paused new generation projects, and moved to slow permitting for renewables while fast-tracking fossil projects.
- A coalition of states has sued over the TotalEnergies deal, and California has announced its intent to sue over the latest terminations; courts have already reversed several other Interior actions on wind and solar as illegal.
- Duke Energy issued a same-week warning to Carolinas customers to raise thermostats during a heat wave, as U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow 20–40% over the next decade.
Why it matters: American ratepayers are on the hook for more than $2.7 billion in Judgment Fund money to scrap gigawatts of wind capacity that would have powered hundreds of thousands of homes, even as utilities warn customers about grid strain during heat waves and U.S. demand is projected to climb 20–40% over the next decade. Interior's pattern of paying companies to abandon clean leases — after courts repeatedly struck down its prior attempts — leaves states preparing litigation and the legal fate of every dollar uncertain.
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