Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices
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- Interior Department struck a $765 million deal with Invenergy to cancel four offshore wind leases off New York/New Jersey, California, and Maine — leases that cost Invenergy $756 million to acquire
- Invenergy will redeploy capital into domestic natural gas-fired projects across multiple states, though the deal also includes some renewable geothermal projects in the Western US
- The Invenergy agreement is the third such payout this year, following a nearly $1 billion TotalEnergies deal in March and an $885 million deal in April, bringing the total to $2.578 billion drawn from the Judgment Fund
- Doug Burgum leads the Interior Department and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry; courts have previously reversed many of his department's energy-related actions on illegality grounds
- Interior allegedly invoked a fake national security rationale and violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and a coalition of states has already sued over the TotalEnergies deal
Why it matters: US electricity demand is projected to grow 20-40% over the next decade per Invenergy's own statements, yet Interior is diverting $2.578 billion of taxpayer money to kill cheap wind leases in favor of more expensive gas — so ratepayers absorb both higher bills and the cost of buying companies out of clean energy commitments.
