California is pushing back against the Trump Administration’s efforts to kill offshore wind energy projects along the Central Coast.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) paid Golden State Wind $120 million — the cost of its offshore lease — to abandon plans for a wind farm in federal waters off Morro Bay.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the DOI used “federal taxpayer dollars” to buy out the lease and cancel the project. In return, Golden State Wind is required to invest the same amount in out-of-state fossil fuel projects.
In response, Attorney General Bonta and the California Energy Commission (CEC) filed a lawsuit last week against both the Trump Administration and Golden State Wind LLC.
They called the buyout a “backroom” deal to undermine California’s clean energy future, jeopardizing thousands of jobs and the state’s more than $100 million in offshore wind investments, and effectively setting back California’s burgeoning wind energy enterprise by years.
In the lawsuit, they claim the deal was “blatantly unlawful” and are asking the court to strike it down.
“The Trump Administration’s backroom buyout with Golden State Wind to stop offshore wind development in favor of gas and oil drilling is, unfortunately, a classic playbook for them to line the pockets of their Big Oil donors,” Bonta said in a statement.
Golden State Wind’s proposed project in the Morro Bay Wind Energy Area — where it purchased its lease in 2022 — was intended to create a two-gigawatt offshore wind farm that could have powered 1.1 million homes. It also made $30 million in commitments to workforce training, supply chain development, and benefits to local communities like fishermen’s associations.
That proposal went up in smoke on April 27 when the DOI announced it would terminate the lease.
The DOI claimed that national security concerns justified the cancellation but did not specify what those concerns were. Bonta’s office noted that the federal government had already reviewed and approved the lease area after years of consultation with the Department of Defense.
The federal government claimed it was reimbursing Golden State Wind with $120 million from the Judgment Fund as a legal settlement and to abate those alleged security concerns.
Bonta’s office called this a “secretive agreement” that “purportedly ‘settles’ litigation that Golden State Wind never brought, challenging action that DOI never took.”
Michael Brown, CEO of Ocean Winds North America — owner of the Golden State Wind project — previously defended the deal, stating that the company did not take the decision lightly, but current market conditions made refunding their lease payments “the right outcome for our shareholders and partners.”
The Trump Administration has framed the Golden State Wind deal — one of several such deals — as moving away from “intermittent, higher-cost energy sources” and “toward proven conventional solutions” — “conventional” meaning established operations such as natural gas.
California’s lawsuit argues that the deal violated numerous federal laws, including the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which “limits DOI’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases,” and the Judgment Fund Act because “the $120 million payment was not a settlement to resolve an existing lawsuit.”
“Instead, it was a fabricated arrangement designed to justify the unlawful cancellation of the Golden State Wind lease,” the state argues.
While offshore wind development has been a controversial subject — due in part to potential impacts on marine ecosystems and fisheries — many Californians were supportive of expanding clean energy production off the coast, including Santa Barbara County congressmember Salud Carbajal and leaders at UC Santa Barbara.
Carmen Rhodes, the executive director at the UCSB Community Labor Center, lauded the investments in infrastructure and “good-paying jobs” that a “responsible offshore wind industry will bring to the Central Coast.”
“Central Coast communities will not allow politically motivated backroom deals to determine our future,” Rhodes said in a statement. “We have strong local leadership and a skilled workforce ready to seize the economic opportunities offshore wind will create, and we are encouraged to see the state reaffirm its commitment to those opportunities for working families.”
In April, Carbajal stated he was “outraged” by the deal and blamed President Donald Trump’s “bizarre personal vendetta” against wind energy — he once fought a wind energy project in Scotland for “ruining the views” near his golf courses — for turning a “historic opportunity into a historic failure.”
Deals on Deals
In July, the state likewise filed a notice of intent to sue against the administration and Invenergy, which also took a buyout deal for its $111 million lease in the Morro Bay Wind Energy Area and committed to reinvesting that money into fossil fuels. The case is still pending.
That leaves one leaseholder still standing in Morro Bay: Equinor. Whether the company holds out remains to be seen.
Adding onto the legal pressure this week, Bonta also announced a notice of intent to sue against the administration and RWE U.S. Offshore (RWE), which took a deal to cancel its offshore wind energy projects off the coast of Humboldt County in California and others in Louisiana and New York.
That federal government reimbursed the company the large sum of $1.22 billion to abandon those projects and re-invest it into fossil fuels. Bonta’s office alleged it has been reported that a majority of the $1.22 billion in federal taxpayer dollars designated for offshore wind will be used by RWE to “purchase a stake in a certain fossil-fuel project run by a major Trump donor and neighbor.”
“Yet again, the Trump Administration is trying to thwart the clean energy industry, but when the President repeats his play, so will we,” Bonta said in a statement.
In all, these deals put a wrench in the CEC’s offshore wind strategic plan. That plan calls for the state to develop 25 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2045, enough to power roughly 25 million homes and “accelerate California’s clean energy transition” and “drive economic development.” Humboldt was one of the ports where offshore wind turbines were expected to be staged and assembled.
Nationwide, the Trump Administration has committed $2.6 billion of taxpayer dollars to buy back offshore wind energy leases, according to Bonta’s office.
