US Declared An Energy Emergency. Then Paid $4 Billion For Less Energy

TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesThe Trump administration has committed nearly $4 billion to persuade energy companies to cancel planned power projects. In a country officially facing an energy emergency, the numbers reveal a striking contradiction between the administration’s rhetoric and its actions. On his first day back in office, President Trump declared a national energy emergency. America, the order said, does not have enough energy.Eighteen months later, his administration has committed nearly $4 billion of public money to pay energy companies to cancel new electricity supply. To be precise, these were not plants already running. They were planned projects: several gigawatts of potential future generation, at a time when U.S. electricity demand is rising rapidly.Hold those two facts next to each other. They cannot both be common sense.The latest installment came on August 6, when the Department of the Interior agreed to pay the German utility RWE $1.22 billion to walk away from three federal offshore wind leases off New York, California, and Louisiana. Capacity estimates for the three sites range from roughly 3.9 gigawatts in near-term development plans to close to six gigawatts at full build-out. That is electricity for well over a million homes, surrendered. The refund covers most of the $1.26 billion RWE originally paid for the leases, and RWE said it saw "no path forward to permit the projects for the foreseeable future."The payment came with conditions. RWE will put $900 million into a liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana and $300 million into gas turbines, and the company notes it holds a pipeline of 15 gas peaker projects in the United States.MORE FOR YOURead that again. Taxpayer money out. Several gigawatts of future electricity generation removed. Most of the replacement investment goes not to generating electricity at all, but to an LNG export project. The rest backs fossil gas plants that still have to be developed and built.Less planned power. More delay. More fossil fuels. All in the name of an energy emergency. Five Rounds, Nearly $4 BillionRWE is the fifth round of settlements in under six months. In March, TotalEnergies received nearly $1 billion for two leases off New York and North Carolina, on the condition that the money flow into the Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas. In April, Golden State Wind and Bluepoint Wind surrendered their leases for nearly $900 million combined, with matching fossil-fuel investment required. In June, Invenergy took $765 million for four early-stage leases, and Duke Energy gave up its Carolina Long Bay lease for $129 million. The AP puts the total at close to $4 billion in agreed reimbursements.Not every settlement dictates where the money goes: Duke is free to reinvest in new generation, including nuclear and grid upgrades. But most of the money came with oil, gas, or LNG strings attached.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls the arrangement an "enormous money pump" in which regular families pay off fossil- fuel donors. The administration does not deny the sums or the conditions. It defends them.The Government's Case, In Four ArgumentsHere is that defense at full strength, so no one can say it was not heard.US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (Photo by Federico PARRA / AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty ImagesAmericans "deserve an energy system built on common sense, not one dependent on costly subsidies or technologies that can't meet our country's current demand." Reliability. Wind is intermittent. The grid needs power that runs on demand, and a country facing surging consumption should prioritize dispatchable generation.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says Americans “deserve an energy system built on common sense, not one dependent on costly subsidies or technologies that can’t meet our country’s current demand”, built on what he calls reliable baseload power.Cost. Offshore wind is more expensive than most other renewable energy. It often depends on subsidies and long-term government-backed contracts, which can leave customers paying higher prices.Whales, birds, and coastlines. President Trump's personal favorite: turbines ruin ocean views, harm whales and birds, and damage fishing and tourism.Taxpayer value. The projects were stranded anyway, the companies held billion-dollar legal claims, and settling for roughly the lease price avoids years of litigation the government might lose.Four Arguments: Take Them One At A TimeReliability does not lead here. Wind needs backup. That is real. Gas can fill gaps when wind output drops. But these deals do something different: they cancel the wind and keep only the gas, turning every hour into a fuel-burning hour. And backup increasingly means batteries too. California’s battery fleet has supplied more than a third of evening demand during peak hours. Gas is not a quick replacement either. GE Vernova’s turbine backlog now stretches years, with some new orders not expected to enter service until around 2031. Needing backup does not require cancelling the power you are supposed to back up.The cost argument runs backwards. Concede what is true: offshore wind costs more than onshore wind or solar, and firming and transmission add to any technology's bill. But American electricity bills are rising faster than inflation, and the EIA found that higher natural gas prices were the main driver of higher wholesale electricity prices at most major U.S. hubs in 2025. These settlements cancel generation while deepening dependence on exactly that fuel, which means deeper exposure to its price swings. And where does the EIA expect the steepest bill increases? New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Pacific coast. Now look at the map of cancelled leases: New York, California, North Carolina, the New York Bight.The whale claim is unsupported. NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for marine mammals, states there is no evidence linking whale deaths to offshore wind development, a finding the Department of Energy publicly reaffirmed. The documented threats to these whales are vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglement. That does not make offshore wind impact-free: federal scientists identify real risks to birds, fisheries, and marine habitats that need assessment and mitigation. But those manageable risks are not evidence that wind farms kill whales. An administration genuinely moved by ocean wildlife would not simultaneously be reopening waters to offshore drilling. The whale claim works politically, but not scientifically.The government created the problem, then paid to settle it. The administration froze offshore wind permitting, leaving projects stranded and triggering legal claims. Taxpayers then paid to resolve those claims. So the government first blocked the projects, then paid companies for the consequences of blocking them. Calling that a legal settlement may make the process sound cleaner. It does not make it cheaper.Four arguments, and not one survives contact with the administration’s own energy emergency. What remains is the plain description: less power, later, at higher cost, with fossil-fuel investment written into most of the terms.This Is Not One Country's StoryThe American deals are one of the sharpest examples yet of public money deployed against the energy transition, but they sit within a broader retreat: earlier this summer I documented 45 major climate policy reversals across 15 jurisdictions in the past year, and the pattern is to keep the climate targets while quietly removing the machinery that would meet them. Climate denial didn't disappear. It moved from the diagnosis to the treatment. Now treatment denial has a budget line.$4 Billion Against $2.2 TrillionHere is the context that should steady anyone tempted toward despair.

The International Energy Agency's World Energy Investment 2026 puts global energy investment at $3.4 trillion this year, with $2.2 trillion flowing to clean energy against $1.2 trillion to fossil fuels. As I wrote in June, capital is backing the transition nearly two to one: clean energy investment exceeds fossil investment by roughly $1 trillion a year.Against that flow, $4 billion is not a dam. It is a handful of gravel thrown in a river, about 0.2 percent of a single year's clean energy investment. RWE itself tells the larger story. The company receiving the settlement continues building renewables across Europe and plans to grow its U.S. generating fleet from 13 to 22 gigawatts by 2031. The investment doesn't disappear. It migrates to markets with clearer permitting and more stable investment conditions, and it takes the jobs, ports, and supply chains with it.What cannot migrate is time. Every gigawatt delayed makes the twin tasks of cutting emissions and meeting rising electricity demand harder, and likely more expensive. And when clean energy increasingly wins on economics and on science, delay becomes the most valuable strategy left to fossil-fuel interests. Delay, unlike leases, cannot be bought back.So document these deals. Name the sums, the beneficiaries, and the conditions attached. Ask every official who signed them one question, in public, until it is answered: You declared an energy emergency. Why did you pay $4 billion for less energy?The silence after that question is where the next reversal gets decided. Make it impossible.