Seven states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its decision to cancel a major offshore wind lease off the coast of New York.
In March, federal officials announced they would pay nearly $1bn in taxpayer dollars to French energy firm TotalEnergies in exchange for the company killing plans to erect two offshore windfarms off New York and North Carolina. TotalEnergies agreed to terminate the projects and pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and gas projects.
The deal was unlawful, says the lawsuit, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.
“The Trump administration is once again trying to kill clean energy projects and destroy good-paying jobs for New Yorkers,” she said in a statement to the Guardian.
The administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies came after federal judges repeatedly struck down the president’s executive orders and stop-work directives which aimed to halt offshore wind development, ruling them unlawful and arbitrary.
“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,” said James. “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.”
In the lawsuit, James and the attorneys general of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont assert that the deal violated the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the interior department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases. It also breaches the Judgment Fund Act – which regulates appropriations used to pay court judgments, awards and compromise settlements – they said, among other allegations.
The plaintiffs are asking a court to strike down agreement, halt the lease cancellation and prevent Donald Trump officials from taking further steps to implement the deal.
In March, Doug Burgum, the secretary of the interior, hailed the deal as “another win for President Trump’s commitment to affordable and reliable energy for all Americans”. Burgum added that offshore wind is “expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive and subsidy-dependent” and had been forced on US taxpayers.
Green groups defended the worth of offshore wind. Sam Salustro, a senior vice-president of pro-offshore wind group Oceantic Network, said: “Paying to remove affordable, homegrown energy out of the equation leaves American consumers struggling to pay their electricity bills.”