Team Trump uses tax dollars to scuttle renewable energy project (yet again)

As the war with Iran moves toward a possible end, one of the many takeaways of the conflict is that it’s clearly in Americans’ interest to embrace renewable energy, not just because it’s cleaner and cheaper, but also because it helps shield U.S. consumers from international turmoil.

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It’s a basic idea the Trump administration doesn’t want to understand. The New York Times reported this week:

The Trump administration on Monday said it would pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon its plans to build an offshore wind farm off North Carolina.

It was the fourth such deal struck by the administration to throttle the development of offshore wind power, a source of renewable energy that President Trump has disparaged for decades.

The new agreement is regressive but straightforward: The Republican administration will reimburse Duke Energy $129 million, which is roughly what it paid for the lease under the Biden administration, and in exchange, the company will abandon the project and reinvest the money in what the Times described as “other sources of energy favored by the Trump administration.”

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. In March, the Republican administration announced it had agreed to pay a foreign company almost $1 billion in American taxpayer money to abandon two wind farm projects that would have produced enough electricity to power more than 1.3 million homes and businesses across New York, New Jersey and North Carolina.

At the administration’s insistence, the company will instead proceed with different energy projects that will cost more and pollute more. Or put another way, thanks to a model imposed by Donald Trump, many American consumers will pay for the privilege of paying more to turn on the lights, all while polluting our own air.

Then in April, it happened again, when the Republican administration announced plans to pay energy companies nearly $900 million to abandon plans for two offshore wind farms. Two months later, Team Trump spent $765 million to buy back another group of offshore wind leases.

The combined price tag for these developments is approaching $3 billion.