The US Department of the Interior (DoI) announced on Monday two "historic" agreements under which the firms behind the Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind projects will voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases.
There is a catch, of course: the leaseholders must first invest a comparable amount in qualifying US conventional energy projects (i.e., oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas infrastructure) before they can recover the money tied to their offshore wind leases.
This isn't the first such development: last month, the DoI reached a similar deal with French energy biz TotalEnergies to reimburse the company approximately $1 billion to give up its wind farm leases in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight area, suggesting that this may be an ongoing strategy.
It appears that paying developers to surrender offshore wind leases has become a fallback strategy after President Trump's executive order halting new federal approvals for wind projects ran into legal challenges from a coalition of state attorneys general and was later struck down in federal court.
In a remarkable coincidence, both sets of developers have decided not to pursue any new offshore wind developments in the US.
Washington's justification for these actions is that it is all part of President Trump's "Energy Dominance Agenda" to "leverage the nation's natural resources" to benefit American citizens and help lower everyday energy costs.
"President Trump is focused on providing affordable and reliable energy to American citizens," claimed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a prepared remark.
"The companies that bid for these offshore wind leases were basically sold a product in 2022 that was only viable when propped up by massive taxpayer subsidies. Now that hardworking Americans are no longer footing the bill for expensive, unreliable, intermittent energy projects, companies are once again investing in affordable, reliable, secure energy infrastructure," he added.
The President's well-known aversion to renewable energy is said to date back at least to his failed legal attempt to stop a wind farm project from being built within sight of his golf course in Scotland over a decade ago.
Looking at the figures, fossil fuel producers are estimated to receive about $34.8 billion a year in federal support through tax breaks, royalty policies, and other subsidies, even though oil and gas have enjoyed public backing for decades and hardly qualify as an emerging industry.
by Dan Robinson, The Register | Read more:
Image: AI
[ed. Your taxpayer dollars at work. See also: Core Scientific accelerates crypto-to-AI pivot, converts Bitcoin mine to gigawatt-scale token farm (Register):]***
Over the past year, all of the major hyperscalers have embraced some kind of non-traditional energy storage or generation tech, some more exotic than others. Google, Oracle, AWS, and others are all betting on small modular reactors (SMRs), tiny nuclear power plants, that can be deployed on site to fuel their AI ambitions. Meanwhile Meta this week signed an agreement with Overview Energy to beam a gigawatt of solar power down from orbit, just as soon as they can lob the arrays into orbit. But, just like SMRs, that won't happen until at least 2030.
Power constraints have become such a limiting factor that major model builders like AWS, Google, and xAI are now talking about building orbital datacenters. However, the economics of such a deployment remain dubious to say the least.
