At a certain level, it defies belief: The Trump administration is spending nearly $4 billion … for nothing.
It’s paid something for nothing at least five times now. Last week, the administration reached a $1.2 billion deal with the German energy company RWE to not build three wind farms, including a large installation off the coast of New Jersey. The Chicago-based developer Invenergy signed a separate deal in June. It’s not clear these deals are legal, yet they keep happening.
These agreements mark the formal end of the first American offshore wind boom, which began in the late 2010s and stepped up during the Biden administration. This buildout, alas, never quite found its sea legs. As recently as February 2022, you could squint at the horizon and imagine that 14 gigawatts of turbines might soon spin along the East Coast. Now, we’ll be lucky to get more than six gigawatts by the end of the decade.
That’s a lot of lost generation capacity — and as I’ve repeatedly written, its absence is going to be a problem for the northeastern United States. The Mid-Atlantic and New England, which were set to receive some of the largest offshore facilities, will still need a lot more new electricity in the years to come, especially during winters. (New York City, for instance, now avoids blackouts by relying on two aging barge-mounted power plants parked in the East River.) And while many of the developers who received President Trump’s payouts pointed to fossil fuel investments in their press releases — as if to imply that those other projects were “replacing” the lost wind farms — relatively few of the power plants mentioned will be built in the Northeast.
Yet there’s another weird aspect of these offshore deals that I haven’t focused on as much: Why are they happening in the first place? That’s the subject of a helpful new article published today by James Sallee, an economics professor at UC Berkeley. He observes that many of the offshore wind projects that the Trump administration has now paid to “cancel” were struggling financially long before January 20, 2025. Few of the farms, if any, would have been built under any administration. So why, exactly, is Trump paying off their developers?
Let’s roll the tape. More than four years ago, the Biden administration held the country’s largest offshore auction ever for a set of promising offshore-wind sites along the Atlantic coast. That brought in more than $4 billion; as part of it, a German company named RWE placed a record-shattering bid for a particularly promising area off New Jersey’s coast. The date? February 25, 2022.
As it turned out, that auction was not the most important thing that happened that week in global energy markets — or world history. A day earlier, Russian troops began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine, igniting a geopolitical firestorm that ultimately ushered in an era of tighter energy supplies, rampant inflation, and higher interest rates. Although the offshore developers could not have known it then, those three trends would reshape the economics of their projects. That’s because offshore wind farms — far more than solar, battery, or gas plants — require titanic upfront investment, as Sallee writes:
Offshore wind is extremely capital intensive: enormous costs come up front, while revenue arrives over decades. Inflation raised the cost of steel, turbines, vessels, and labor. Higher interest rates reduced the present value of future revenue and raised financing costs. Where developers signed fixed-price contracts, developers were left holding the capital cost risk when conditions changed.
Unit economics started to deteriorate, and costs ballooned. Projects started to fail as early as October 2023, when Orsted canceled its Ocean Wind 1 and 2 projects slated for the New Jersey coast. I remember talking to an energy expert at the time who mused that for the same per-megawatt cost as an offshore wind farm, the state might as well just build a new Westinghouse nuclear reactor. (Its governor Mikie Sherrill is now exploring doing just that.)
By the time President Trump took office, in other words, many offshore wind projects were already on financial life support, if not deceased. Given the real underlying shift in project economics, that should have decreased the value of developers’ offshore leases — which are, as Sallee writes, more of an option than a permit, because they give a developer the right to study an area but do not authorize construction per se.
Yet over the past year, the Trump administration has reimbursed five developers largely in full, and it hasn’t gotten much in return. Perhaps that’s what the administration needed to do in order to fully kill these projects without risk of future legal sanction. Yet it is … strange. “The deals relate to development rights that look uneconomic today, even before the buyouts,” Sallee says. “The buyouts may limit how quickly offshore wind could rebound in a future economic and policy environment, but as of today it seems as though the government just spent $3.9 billion of taxpayer dollars spent to shoot a corpse.”
I wonder if that description undersells it. In a certain light, the government isn’t really shooting the corpse so much as handing it big wads of cash. Since the first of these deals were announced, I’ve struggled with what to call them — buyouts? payouts? — but Sallee’s post (which you should go read in full) made me wonder if bailout is the best option. After all, imagine if a hypothetical President Kamala Harris had reimbursed this same set of companies for the full value of their failed offshore wind bets — and used the Justice Department’s permanent and technically unlimited Judgement Fund to do it. What would journalists say then? How would Republicans respond?
Or to make the analogy truly work, I suppose, imagine that a President Harris had bailed out oil companies for some overly exuberant bet made during an earlier Republican administration, then claimed (with dubious evidence) that they would use the refunds to build renewables. That would still be an enormous waste of public money, but it would scramble the politics somewhat, perhaps evoking astonished embarrassment from her allies and delighted confusion from her opponents. Which might — to return to our world — mirror some of the response we’re seeing to Trump’s wind payouts.
