Image: Vineyard Wind Offshore
The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.
Original post 6/17, Updated 6/30: Interior announced another deal on Monday, this one with Duke Energy to cancel a project in Carolina Long Bay.
Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.
It’s also an important resource at a time when American electricity demand is increasing, leading to higher energy bills as the proliferation of data centers squeezes energy availability.
However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.
As such, Burgum has done all he can to stop cheap and clean energy projects and to try to benefit dirty and expensive fossil fuels, to the detriment of Americans’ lungs and electricity bills.
Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service). His party suggested drastic new fees on wind farms, far in excess of the inspection fees on dirty oil projects.
But many of those efforts have been swiftly reversed by courts due to their illegality.
This hasn’t stopped Burgum from coming up with other illegal ideas to starve Americans of the energy they need.
The latest trend has involved a pattern of bribes given to oil companies from public coffers to convince them to stop development of offshore wind and instead refocus on gas projects.
It started with a nearly-$1B bribe from taxpayer coffers to French oil giant TotalEnergies in March, basically buying out its offshore wind lease in exchange for a commitment to put that money into fossil fuel projects.
Interior made up a fake national security reason for this agreement, even though it is clear that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense had signed off on these projects.
But it didn’t stop there. Interior has continued with similar near-billion-dollar bribes, with an $885 million deal in April, and another near-billion-dollar deal today, June 17.
$765 million to Invenergy to abandon wind power
This agreement is with Invenergy, which had 4 leases, one off the coast in New York and New Jersey, one in California, and two in Maine, that cost them a total of $756 million. Each of those will be canceled and bought back in full.
In exchange, Invenergy will “deploy capital into additional domestic natural gas-fired projects in a multitude of states.” Gas-powered electricity plants create pollution, and therefore impose higher costs on ratepayers than clean offshore wind.
However, in a difference with the other deals, the Invenergy deal will include some geothermal projects in the Western US, which is a renewable and zero-carbon energy source. So that’s something.
Invenergy says that “the approach will bring more megawatts to the grid and advance projects that can move forward today,” which is likely true solely due to the regulatory red tape that Interior has worked to put up around energy projects, making them more difficult to build at a time when they are needed most (Invenergy itself says “over the next ten years, United States electricity demand is expected to grow 20-40%, a rate not seen in more than 20 years”).
Update 6/30: $129 million to Duke Energy to cancel project in Carolina Long Bay
Interior announced another illegal deal on Monday, June 29, bribing Duke Energy with $129 million of taxpayer funds to cancel a project in Carolina Long Bay, the same area as the first of these illegal deals. The area was originally leased in 2022.
The project was expected to generate 1.6GW, enough to power 375,000 homes. Now it will be cancelled, starving the region of that electricity and harming energy security. Duke says it will refocus that money on new generation capacity that may include fossil fuels, helping republicans’ goal of making Americans’ lives more expensive and less safe.
Interestingly, at almost exactly the same time this deal was announced, Duke Energy also put out a warning to customers in the Carolinas that they should set their thermostat a few degrees higher due to a heat wave that would put increased strain on the grid.
That heat is made more severe as a result of the climate change caused by fossil fuel projects like the one that Duke has decided to refocus on, and the strain on the grid has been made greater by stopping mid-project on safe, reliable and cheap energy that could have relieved that strain, as republicans seek to starve Americans of the energy the country needs to flourish.
Over $2.5 billion illegally paid out in efforts to raise your energy costs
The total, among the three deals so far this year, is $2.578 billion of taxpayer funds being illegally paid out to shift companies from wind to oil and gas projects.
These agreements illegally use the Judgment Fund, a US government fund set aside to pay settlements against the government, for their payouts. Interior says that these funds are being given to these companies in anticipation of a possible lawsuit by the energy companies, but no lawsuit was filed and there are emails showing that Interior made the decision for the bribe before it had invented its fake justification for it.
They also violate the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which was passed to “enhance the energy security of the US” and which limits the government’s ability to cancel such leases.
A coalition of states recently sued over the TotalEnergies deal, and we expect lawsuits for the following deals to come. California has already announced its intent to sue over the illegal project termination.
And, given the legal history of the group in question, it seems unlikely that most of these deals will pass legal muster. We’d expect courts not to rule kindly on these actions, but in the meantime, Americans will be starved of the electricity they need today due to intentional actions by enemies of this country like Burgum.
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