US to pay almost $1bn to French energy company to kill wind project plan

Trump administration announces deal with TotalEnergies to redirect investment in wind to oil and gas instead As a fuel crisis triggered by the war in Iran drives up global fossil fuel prices, the Trump administration has announced it will pay French energy major TotalEnergies $1bn to kill plans to construct wind farms off the US east coast. The deal is the latest blow to the US offshore wind industry, which has faced repeated disruptions to multi-billion-dollar projects under Donald Trump. The US president has said he finds wind turbines ugly, costly and inefficient, and his administration has moved to increase domestic fossil fuel production. In the deal announced on Monday, TotalEnergies will give up two offshore leases it had purchased off New York and North Carolina. Trump’s Department of the Interior will reimburse the company the $928m it paid for the leases under Joe Biden. TotalEnergies has pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the country, a US interior department statement said, and will invest nearly $1bn this year in the development of four trains at the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas, and the development of upstream conventional oil in the US Gulf and