May 4 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Monday opened an investigation into the Trump administration’s agreement \u200cwith an offshore wind company to cancel \u200ca planned project off the state’s central coast.<\/p>\n
The state said it \u200bwas seeking information about the $120 million government payout to determine whether it violated the law.<\/p>\n
The refunds of offshore lease payments, in exchange for fossil fuel investments, are part \u200cof a recent \u2060strategy in President Donald Trump’s year-long effort to stymie the nation’s young offshore wind \u2060industry.<\/p>\n
The California Energy Commission said it had issued a subpoena to Golden State Wind LLC, a joint venture between \u200bOcean Winds \u200band London-based offshore wind \u200binvestment firm Reventus Power. \u200cOcean Winds is a partnership between France’s ENGIE and Portugal’s EDP Renewables.<\/p>\n
“Californians deserve immediate answers about the nature of this payout,” CEC Chair David Hochschild said in a statement. “Taxpayer dollars should be used to build a \u200csustainable energy future, not to \u200bpay to make projects disappear.”<\/p>\n
California \u200bhas a goal \u200bto install 25 gigawatts of offshore wind \u200cby 2045 to help meet \u200bits climate change \u200bgoals. The state said it had invested more than $100 million to develop port and transmission infrastructure \u200bneeded for offshore \u200cwind.<\/p>\n
Golden State Wind and Interior Department officials were \u200bnot immediately available for comment.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Nichola \u200bGroom; Editing by Stephen Coates)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 4 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Monday opened an investigation into the Trump administration’s agreement \u200cwith…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,14598,9,8,536,6832,127389,15661],"class_list":["post-301354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-energy-commission","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-offshore-wind","tag-planned-project","tag-the-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}