Seven states filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Trump administration’s nearly $1 billion deal with TotalEnergies to cancel its offshore wind leases in the United States.
The attorneys general, led by the state of New York, sued the Trump administration over the agreement with the French energy giant in which the Interior Department terminated the leases for TotalEnergies’ Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay projects. In exchange, the company committed to invest the value of those leases into U.S. oil and natural gas production and said it would no longer develop offshore wind projects in the United States.
The agreement marked a new front in the Trump administration’s wider effort against the U.S. offshore wind industry, after it suffered numerous losses in the courts.
“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Tuesday. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”
