We’ve bought back five wind leases. When do we fix the system that made that necessary?
Recently, the Trump administration announced its fifth offshore wind lease buyback, cutting a deal with German energy company RWE to walk away from planned projects in New York, California, and Louisiana in exchange for $1.22 billion. The agreement mirrors deals already struck with TotalEnergies, Invenergy, Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind, and Duke Energy, bringing the running total of cancelled projects and redeployed capital to nearly $4 billion.
Some Democrats called it a corrupt, taxpayer-funded scheme to scare capital away from renewables and hand America’s energy future to China. Seven state attorneys general have already sued the administration over its earlier deal with TotalEnergies. That response isn’t entirely wrong. But it’s incomplete, and I say that as a Democrat who served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Using the courts as a substitute for energy policy is a losing strategy. The lawsuits, like the political outrage, miss a much larger point.
RWE, like the others before it, paid the federal government real money for real leases under rules that were in effect at the time. That capital, from pension funds, retirement accounts, and institutional investors, went into the Treasury in 2022. Then the political climate changed dramatically. So Interior reached a resolution: companies redeploy their capital into domestic energy infrastructure, dollar-for-dollar, and get reimbursed what they originally paid. Bluepoint Wind, for instance, is putting the full $765 million it paid the Treasury back to work in a U.S. LNG facility.
That is the developer’s own capital returning to American energy production, not a taxpayer transfer and not a federal government subsidy. The transactions are a piecemeal fix but they aren’t a durable solution, and the frustrating irony is that Congress knows it. Permitting reform has bipartisan potential, but thanks to a frustrating string of stalled bills, collapsed negotiations, and expired calendars, it’s never gotten over the finish line.
As TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné bluntly diagnosed: “If you have a change in the administration every four years and they change their minds, you invest every four years, you stop, it doesn’t work.” He was describing offshore wind leases, but the same principle applies to LNG terminals, transmission lines, pipelines, nuclear plants, and critical minerals mines. The projects this administration champions face the identical structural vulnerability the moment the next administration arrives.
This dysfunction lands hardest on American consumers. The AI boom is driving an electricity demand surge unlike anything the grid has absorbed in decades. Data centers alone are projected to consume a growing share of national power output, and that demand is only accelerating. Every gigawatt that sits trapped in a permitting queue or a courtroom through self-inflicted regulatory paralysis is a gigawatt that isn’t powering the economy.
The case for permitting reform is straightforward. NEPA timelines routinely stretch past a decade and judicial review can unwind years of agency work on procedural grounds. That is how companies acting in good faith, following every rule on the books, wind up stranded between the administration that approved their leases and the one that no longer wants their projects built.
Climate litigation compounds the problem. Honolulu v. Sunoco, filed over six years ago, has been delayed, rerouted, and appealed for years without resolution, tying up courts and deterring the infrastructure investment that would actually lower energy costs. Dozens of similar suits follow the same pattern. And yet Congress does nothing, the courtroom theater continues, and capital sits on the sidelines.
A recent Wood Mackenzie analysis found more than $121 billion in energy investment at permitting risk, with 92 gigawatts of projects facing heightened federal scrutiny. PJM paused its interconnection queue for years under the weight of a 300-gigawatt backlog. A 2025 Resources for the Future study estimated that transmission delays alone cost American consumers roughly $19 billion in higher electricity and natural gas prices annually, a tax on every household and business.
Nearly $4 billion in lease settlements is not quiet anymore. But it only captures the deals that got done. It says nothing about the projects never started, the capital never committed, the grid capacity that exists only as a line in a queue spreadsheet.
The attorneys general suing the Trump administration over these buybacks are fighting the last battle. The real fight, the one with consequences for consumers, for grid reliability, for American competitiveness, is building a permitting system that doesn’t produce these situations in the first place. The argument for action has never been more concrete, or more expensive to ignore.
Albert R. Wynn represented Maryland’s 4th Congressional District from 1993 to 2008 and served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.