Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity costs

The Interior Department has made another illegal agreement with a gas company to drop development of cheap and clean offshore wind and instead focus on dirty, expensive gas, giving that company the better part of a billion dollars worth of taxpayer money while starving Americans of much-needed electricity.

Original post 6/17, Updated 6/30: Interior announced another deal on Monday, this one with Duke Energy to cancel a project in Carolina Long Bay.

Update 8/6: Interior has bribed German wind company RWE $1.22 billion to give up offshore leases in New York, Louisiana and California.

Wind is one of the cheaper forms of energy we have available to us, and also has the benefit of not causing pollution. Pollution from fossil fuels harms human health, causing millions of deaths and childhood asthma cases and costing trillions of dollars per year globally.

It’s also an important resource at a time when American electricity demand is increasing, leading to higher energy bills as the proliferation of data centers squeezes energy availability.

However, the Department of the Interior, the government agency responsible for usage of public lands including oceans, is currently occupied by Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel advocate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

As such, Burgum has done all he can to stop cheap and clean energy projects and to try to benefit dirty and expensive fossil fuels, to the detriment of Americans’ lungs and electricity bills.

Interior has cut off 400k homes worth of power just before Christmas, tried to pause new power generation projects and halt existing constructions, and tried to make permitting harder (while fast-tracking expensive, dirty projects with “concierge” service). His party suggested drastic new fees on wind farms, far in excess of the inspection fees on dirty oil projects.

But many of those efforts have been swiftly reversed by courts due to their illegality.

This hasn’t stopped Burgum from coming up with other illegal ideas to starve Americans of the energy they need.

The latest trend has involved a pattern of bribes given to oil companies from public coffers to convince them to stop development of offshore wind and instead refocus on gas projects.

It started with a nearly-$1B bribe from taxpayer coffers to French oil giant TotalEnergies in March, basically buying out its offshore wind lease in exchange for a commitment to put that money into fossil fuel projects.

Interior made up a fake national security reason for this agreement, even though it is clear that domestic sources of power are far more secure than the kind that start intractable global conflicts. Courts have previously ruled that there are no national security concerns around wind power and Dept. of Defense had signed off on these projects.

But it didn’t stop there. Interior has continued with similar near-billion-dollar bribes, with an $885 million deal in April, and another near-billion-dollar deal on June 17.

$765 million to Invenergy to abandon wind power

This agreement is with Invenergy, which had 4 leases, one off the coast in New York and New Jersey, one in California, and two in Maine, that cost them a total of $756 million. Each of those will be canceled and bought back in full.

In exchange, Invenergy will “deploy capital into additional domestic natural gas-fired projects in a multitude of states.” Gas-powered electricity plants create pollution, and therefore impose higher costs on ratepayers than clean offshore wind.

However, in a difference with the other deals, the Invenergy deal will include some geothermal projects in the Western US, which is a renewable and zero-carbon energy source. So that’s something.

Invenergy says that “the approach will bring more megawatts to the grid and advance projects that can move forward today,” which is likely true solely due to the regulatory red tape that Interior has worked to put up around energy projects, making them more difficult to build at a time when they are needed most (Invenergy itself says “over the next ten years, United States electricity demand is expected to grow 20-40%, a rate not seen in more than 20 years”).

Update 6/30: $129 million to Duke Energy to cancel project in Carolina Long Bay

Interior announced another illegal deal on Monday, June 29, bribing Duke Energy with $129 million of taxpayer funds to cancel a project in Carolina Long Bay, the same area as the first of these illegal deals. The area was originally leased in 2022.

The project was expected to generate 1.6GW, enough to power 375,000 homes. Now it will be cancelled, starving the region of that electricity and harming energy security. Duke says it will refocus that money on new generation capacity that may include fossil fuels, helping republicans’ goal of making Americans’ lives more expensive and less safe.

Interestingly, at almost exactly the same time this deal was announced, Duke Energy also put out a warning to customers in the Carolinas that they should set their thermostat a few degrees higher due to a heat wave that would put increased strain on the grid.

That heat is made more severe as a result of the climate change caused by fossil fuel projects like the one that Duke has decided to refocus on, and the strain on the grid has been made greater by stopping mid-project on safe, reliable and cheap energy that could have relieved that strain, as republicans seek to starve Americans of the energy the country needs to flourish.

Update 8/6: $1.22 billion to RWE to cancel leases in New York Bight, Louisiana and California

In the 5 weeks since the last illegal bribe using taxpayer money to raise your electricity costs, electricity has continued to be in short supply, and electricity prices have continued to rise, reaching the highest rate ever seen in the US in July.

Despite those rising prices, Interior has continued its effort to make them go even higher, announcing today that it has paid off German energy company RWE to cancel a lease in New York Bight, off the coast of New York and New Jersey, and a lease off the California coast.

RWE said “after careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” likely due to the administration’s illegal delaying of wind permitting.

Notably, that illegal permitting delay was also subject to a court decision today, wherein a federal court blocked the administration’s nonsense excuse that, somehow, secure domestic energy projects that are not subject to the chaos we are intentionally causing in international oil markets are supposedly a threat to national security. The Department of Defense had been holding up some 150 wind power projects by refusing to give its a-okay.

It will also replace an offshore wind lease in Louisiana with a stake in a liquified methane terminal in the state. Additionally, it says it will build $300 million worth of dirty methane gas turbines to fuel data centers, which are making electricity both more expensive and dirtier.

Methane is about 80 times worse than CO2 in terms of its effect on climate change, and many countries are currently rushing to get off of it, recognizing both the threat of climate change and the threat of being beholden to unstable energy markets as oil prices spike globally.

RWE closes its press release by stating that it continues to grow its offshore wind portfolio around the globe. Apparently, the rest of the globe gets access to abundant, cheap, clean energy, while America bribes companies to stop giving us the electricity we need to confront the challenges of today.

Over $3.9 billion illegally paid out in efforts to raise your energy costs

The total, among the deals so far this year, is over $3.9 billion of taxpayer funds being illegally paid out to shift companies from wind to oil and gas projects, not only raising your electricity costs, but also your health costs from pollution.

These agreements illegally use the Judgment Fund, a US government fund set aside to pay settlements against the government, for their payouts. Interior says that these funds are being given to these companies in anticipation of a possible lawsuit by the energy companies, but no lawsuit was filed and there are emails showing that Interior made the decision for the bribe before it had invented its fake justification for it.

Company press releases make little to no mention of possible litigation. RWE’s press release frames it as a business decision because of difficult permitting processes, and TotalEnergies claimed some sort of nonsense about American “national interest” – nothing to do with lawsuits.

The agreements also violate the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which was passed to “enhance the energy security of the US” and which limits the government’s ability to cancel such leases.

A coalition of states recently sued over the TotalEnergies deal, and we expect lawsuits for the following deals to come. California has already announced its intent to sue over the illegal project termination. Given that the flagrant violations have continued since then (and California is now down from 5 projects to 2, starving the state of 2 million homes’ worth of electricity), we expect to see that lawsuit soon.

And, given the legal history of the group in question, it seems unlikely that most of these deals will pass legal muster. We’d expect courts not to rule kindly on these actions, but in the meantime, Americans will be starved of the electricity they need today due to intentional actions by enemies of this country like Burgum.

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