$4 Billion to Build Nothing

tags: trump, offshore wind, fossil fuel

A president promises energy dominance while spending billions to erase the clean power industry.

"I've spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development. I've never seen people cheering for job destruction."

Tim Sullivan, former CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority

On August 6, the German utility RWE announced it had reached a $1.22 billion settlement with the Trump administration to cancel three offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana. In exchange, RWE agreed to redirect that money into natural gas: $900 million for a 16 percent stake in a Louisiana LNG export terminal, and another $300 million for gas-fired peaking turbines around the country.

It was the twelfth offshore wind lease the administration had coaxed a developer into abandoning. The total tab now stands at $3.93 billion in taxpayer-funded buyouts.

The companies being paid to walk away are the same ones that spent years securing federal leases, financing feasibility studies, and hiring domestic supply chains. The government then handed them a payout to undo all of it.

Translation: the American taxpayer is financing the destruction of American clean energy infrastructure.

The pattern began in March with TotalEnergies. The French energy giant received roughly $1 billion to cancel the Empire Wind project off New York and New Jersey, which would have generated enough electricity for more than 1.6 million homes. In return, TotalEnergies committed to investing in U.S. oil and gas ventures.

Since then, the administration has settled with Invenergy, Ocean Winds, Reventus Power, BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, and now RWE. Each deal follows the same template: the developer forfeits the lease, the government reimburses sunk costs and adds a premium, and the company pledges to invest the recovered capital in fossil fuel projects.

RWE's statement captured the administration's effectiveness: "After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future."

No path forward. Not because the technology is unproven, not because the economics are broken, but because the Department of Justice is paying companies to walk.

Seven states led by New York filed suit in June, calling the TotalEnergies deal a "sham settlement agreement to unlawfully cancel an offshore wind lease." Eight attorneys general subsequently filed notices of intent to challenge additional buyouts. California has filed two separate notices of intent to sue, including one triggered by the RWE agreement.

The Environmental Defense Fund called the administration's strategy an attempt to "completely throttle California's offshore wind industry before it can get off the ground." Hillary Bright of the advocacy group Turn Forward noted that eliminating utility-scale power sources from coastal population centers "does nothing to address rising ratepayer affordability concerns, reliability challenges, or potential gaps in power supply in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic."

The irony is structural. The nation's electricity demand is surging from AI data centers and broader electrification. At the same time, the federal government is burning nearly $4 billion to eliminate exactly the kind of large-scale, dispatchable clean generation that could help meet it.

The White House calls it energy dominance. The math calls it vandalism.

Before the administration took office, BloombergNEF projected the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough power for 13 million homes. By the end of Trump's first year back, analysts downgraded that estimate to 6 gigawatts.

The human toll is harder to quantify but no less real. Union training programs invested millions in preparing workers for a decade of offshore projects. Millwrights Local 1121 spent $10,000 to $20,000 per member on certification. Piledrivers Local 56 invested roughly $30,000 per worker in heavy-lift training and built the only U.S.-based school for the skill.

Gerard Mullin, a pile driver from Boston, made more in his first eight weeks offshore than he had saved in the previous five years. After a building fire destroyed his possessions last November, offshore wind income allowed him to buy a condo six weeks later. Now he is back to onshore construction work at a fraction of the pay.

Anthony Hibbard, an ironworker who went from first-generation Vineyard Wind to foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, earns one-fifth of his offshore salary in local onshore jobs. "I make enough to get by," he said. "But I don't have the scope to continue being smart with it."

Zaheer Razi, a 28-year-old commercial diver with Piledrivers Local 56, expects his current Revolution Wind project to run through mid-August, after which "it's really going to be silent for the next two or three years."

Esther Rosario of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York put it bluntly: "You can't apprentice somebody into a job that doesn't exist."

The offshore wind industry in the United States began in earnest around 2011, decades after Europe established commercial farms. The first U.S. project, Block Island near Rhode Island, came online in 2016. Under the Biden administration, offshore wind became a central priority: federal leases were sold to major international developers, states offered financial incentives, and communities from Salem, Massachusetts to Paulsboro, New Jersey invested in port infrastructure to support the supply chain.

Salem County, New Jersey, one of the state's poorest counties with 65,000 residents, was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs. Italian manufacturer Prysmian Group planned a cable plant near New Bedford, Massachusetts. A $34 million federal grant funded an offshore wind terminal in Salem that would have employed 800 construction workers.

Trump canceled the Salem grant in August 2025. Prysmian abandoned its New Bedford plant in January 2025. Salem County is waiting for a boom that will not come.

Andy Benedetto, business manager of Millwrights Local 1121, said his union "built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training, they're going to carry over for the next 10 years."

The dream was the administration's own doing.

The RWE agreement is the latest entry in a ledger that gets longer every month. Nearly $4 billion in federal money. Twelve canceled leases. Thousands of trained workers returning to lower-paying onshore jobs or unemployment. Supply chains dismantled. Port infrastructure sitting idle. States mounting legal challenges.

The White House frames each settlement as a victory for energy security. A White House spokeswoman said the administration has "delivered on its popular promise to reverse the Left's costly Green New Scam" and "restored U.S. energy dominance."

But dominance does not mean paying international energy companies billions of dollars to abandon American leases and redirect capital to fossil fuel projects. Dominance does not mean convincing developers to buy stakes in gas terminals and polluting peaking plants instead of building wind farms.

The question is not whether this was a bad idea. The question is why anyone thought the American public would not notice when $4 billion of its money bought nothing but silence at sea.