The Trump admin paid a French company $1 billion to not build offshore wind farms. Blue states are suing

A coalition of seven blue states sued the Trump administration Tuesday after it paid a French company nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to not build offshore wind farms.

The lawsuit, led by New York attorney general Letitia James, argued that the deal struck between TotalEnergies and the Trump administration earlier this year deprived their states of much-needed power, and could raise electricity costs in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions.

In March, the Trump administration announced it would pay French energy giant TotalEnergies $928 million in taxpayer funds to reimburse the company for leases it had purchased under the Biden administration, allowing it to develop two offshore wind farms in waters near New York and North Carolina. The vast majority of that — $795 million — would have gone towards developing the New York project.

In exchange, TotalEnergies would spend that reimbursed money on the development of a new liquified natural gas plant in Texas, helping export US LNG overseas to Europe, CEO Patrick Pouyanné said in a statement at the time.

In April, the administration announced it would spend another nearly $900 million to repay two more wind energy developers to not build projects in New York and California (the April deal is not part of the current lawsuit).

In a statement, James called the March announcement an “illegal agreement.”

“After repeatedly losing in court, this administration cooked up a sham deal to pay a foreign energy company hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to abandon offshore wind and invest in oil and gas instead,” James said.

The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. State attorneys general from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island argued on Tuesday the administration had violated the law when executing the March deal — failing to hold a hearing required by law to determine that keeping the offshore wind leases “would likely cause serious harm to life, property, national security, or the environment.”