The New York attorney general and the top prosecutors of six other Northeast states on Tuesday sued the Trump administration over what they call a “blatantly unlawful” deal to cancel a $795 million offshore wind lease.
The suit stems from an agreement the U.S. Department of the Interior struck with French energy company TotalEnergies in March. Under the terms of the deal, TotalEnergies renounced its wind lease and agreed to invest about $1 billion in oil and natural gas production, in exchange for a full reimbursement by the federal government.
“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,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit is the latest chapter in the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel offshore wind leases. The campaign has generated intense pushback from Northeast and New England states that have budgeted for thousands of megawatts of new clean energy.
President Donald Trump halted federal approvals for wind energy projects across the country on his first day in office last year. James and a coalition of attorneys general sued, and a federal judge struck down the ban in December.
The administration also tried to stop construction on two of New York’s offshore wind projects on national security grounds — but a federal judge sided with the state earlier this year.
Federal officials then set their sights on TotalEnergies subsidiary Attentive Energy, which in 2022 paid $795 million to purchase a lease about 50 miles off the coast of New York and New Jersey.
State regulators said the project would have provided power to roughly 700,000 New York homes and created more than 1,700 new jobs.
Development stopped after the company’s deal with the Department of the Interior. TotalEnergies also pledged not to develop any other offshore wind projects in the United States.
“Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at the time.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said she and James would “continue to aggressively fight back against Donald Trump's overt and never-ending hostility toward offshore wind, including his unlawful use of the most powerful office in the world to get private companies like TotalEnergies to bow to his will.”
James is asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to strike the agreement and vacate the lease cancellation.
The attorneys general of New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont are also parties to the lawsuit.
