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Christopher Niezreck[/caption]
The U.S. is in a bizarre situation in 2026: It’s facing a looming energy shortage, yet the Trump administration is making deals to pay offshore wind developers nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to walk away from energy projects.
These politically motivated moves are costing Americans more than the buyouts.
Communities have been laying the groundwork for offshore energy projects for years. Offshore wind development brings jobs and economic development that reshape regional economies, with the scale of public and private investment reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars over years. East Coast communities have built up ports to support the industry and launched job-training programs to prepare workers. Construction, maintenance and shipping businesses have sprung up, along with secondary businesses that support the industry.
Losing the projects and the threat of losing other planned wind farms will also likely mean higher energy prices.
As a result, Americans will bear the economic brunt of these decisions for decades.
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Ben Link[/caption]
To understand how the U.S. arrived in this predicament, let’s take a step back.
In March 2023, leaders from three U.S. federal agencies under the Biden administration met with the CEOs from American technology and manufacturing giants Microsoft, Amazon, Ford, GM, Dow Chemical and GE at the annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, under the banner of “Affordable, Reliable and Secure American-Made Energy.”
They agreed on a key point: the nation was staring down a severe shortage of electrons to drive American business forward.
Fortunately, solutions abounded. Enormous amounts of onshore wind and solar power had been deployed during the previous five years. More than 80% of all new power additions to the U.S. grid have come from these two sources.
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Zoe Getman-Pickering[/caption]
Particularly exciting were plans to build large offshore wind farms on the East Coast. Taken together, the wind farms would generate 30 gigawatts of new power by 2030, enough to power more than 10 million homes and reduce volatility in energy pricing thanks to long-term power purchase agreements.
In the months following the 2023 meeting, leasing and permitting for the U.S. mega projects continued, and in some areas, construction got underway.
Then, the Trump administration arrived in 2025. As president, Donald Trump immediately issued an executive order to halt offshore wind lease sales and any approvals, permits, or loans for wind farms.
After a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order unconstitutional in December 2025, the administration shifted strategies.
In March 2026, news outlets began reporting on deals struck in which the federal government would pay three offshore wind project developers hundreds of millions of dollars to cease development of their permitted projects, agree not to build others and repurpose the funds toward fossil fuel projects.
According to reported discussions involving the French energy company TotalEnergies, the money would be paid out through the Department of the Interior’s Judgment Fund, intended for payment of legal settlements, despite there not being any active litigation with TotalEnergies.
Regardless of whether these buyouts are even legal, the losing parties will be the American taxpayers and a U.S. economy that needs more electrons on the grid, not fewer.
One analysis projected that deploying 40 gigawatts along the U.S. East Coast by 2035 would generate roughly $140 billion in investment, much of it concentrated in port infrastructure and supply chain development.
Canceling projects or buying back leases eliminates the electricity those projects would have generated. It also slows the accumulation of experience, scale and supply chain maturity that drive costs down over time. The result is higher costs for future projects and for electricity ratepayers.
Meanwhile, future U.S. and global energy demand is projected to grow significantly, largely driven by the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers and electrification of vehicles, homes and businesses. Limiting the supply of homegrown energy will increase energy costs for Americans.
Christopher Niezrecki is the director of the Center of Energy Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Ben Link is the deputy director of the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Zoe Getman-Pickering is program director of the Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
