FRANK LASEE: Trump’s ‘Billion-Dollar Giveaway’ Actually A Refund To Kill Costly Offshore Wind
Headlines last week (NY Times, NPR, CNN) screamed that President Donald Trump was handing nearly a billion dollars to a French energy giant to cancel building offshore wind farms. The coverage was classic gotcha…
Headlines last week (NY Times, NPR, CNN) screamed that President Donald Trump was handing nearly a billion dollars to a French energy giant to cancel building offshore wind farms. The coverage was classic gotcha journalism — misleading, incomplete, and designed to fit a tired narrative. The real story is far more straightforward and sensible.
On March 23, 2026, the Department of the Interior reached a settlement with TotalEnergies. The U.S. government is refunding $928 million — the exact amount the company paid to the Biden administration in 2022 when it won two offshore wind leases off New York/New Jersey and North Carolina.
In return, TotalEnergies will cancel both leases and formally agree not to pursue any new offshore wind projects in the United States. The company will instead redirect that capital into American oil, natural gas, and LNG projects.
This is not corporate welfare. It is a refund of money already paid, exchanged for killing two expensive, unreliable projects before they could burden American ratepayers. And TotalEnergies agreed to keep the money in the U.S. and use it for oil and natural gas. The headline should have read, “Win-Win — Trump gets French company TotalEnergies to invest a billion dollars on reliable, affordable American energy instead of offshore wind.”
Offshore wind electricity is significantly more costly than natural gas. Recent Levelized Cost of Energy analyses show new offshore wind projects coming in between $100 and $140 per megawatt-hour — 50% to 150% more expensive than electricity from new natural gas combined-cycle plants, which typically deliver power for $60–$80/MWh.
That gap widens dramatically once we account for the real world.
Wind is intermittent. When the wind doesn’t blow, electricity has to come from somewhere else. Atlantic offshore wind blows about half the time, depending on location. That means either building and maintaining expensive battery storage systems or keeping backup natural gas plants on standby. Paying double rarely gets included in the rosy headlines about offshore wind — once for on-demand natural gas and again for part-time offshore wind. That’s expensive.