The Trump administration may have just won one battle against the offshore wind industry, but it is not winning the war.
On Monday, the Department of the Interior announced it will pay TotalEnergies—a French energy company developing two wind farms off the coasts of New York State and North Carolina—to abandon the projects and invest the funds in oil and gas instead. Rumors of the deal surfaced last week as two other projects Trump had failed to kill hit major milestones, underscoring the administration’s desperation to slow the growth of offshore wind.
TotalEnergies’ acceptance of the payout is a blow to the industry, but far from a fatal one. Just one day after the DOI announced the deal, the largest offshore wind farm in the U.S. began operations.
“Today, [Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind] delivered its first power to the grid—right on schedule,” Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue wrote in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. “This achievement marks another important step forward, adding much‑needed electricity to help meet the fastest‑growing power demand in the country.”
CVOW comes online
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) is a 2.6‑gigawatt, 176-turbine offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia Beach. In February, Dominion—the developer—reported that construction is more than 70% complete, and Blue said Tuesday that the project remains on track for completion in early 2027.
When CVOW is fully operational, it will generate enough clean, renewable energy to power up to 660,000 homes, according to Dominion. The company claims the wind farm will save customers $3 billion in fuel costs during its first decade of operations.
Dominion primarily serves residents of Virginia and the Carolinas, where the AI boom is driving a major surge of data center growth. As of December 2025, Virginia had more operational and planned data centers than any other U.S. state. This has strained the state’s power resources and driven up utilities costs—problems that CVOW could help alleviate.
Despite this, CVOW was one of five offshore wind projects the Trump administration tried to derail in December due to “national security risks.” A federal judge ultimately allowed all five projects to proceed, and despite the pause, CVOW still delivered its first power to the grid on schedule.
Trump’s new battle strategy
TotalEnergies’ offshore wind projects—Attentive Energy in the New York Bight and Carolina Long Bay off the coast of North Carolina—will never reach that milestone. The company’s deal with the Trump administration requires it to renounce both leases, which together cost $928 million.
According to the DOI’s statement, TotalEnergies will now invest the value of its renounced offshore wind leases in U.S. oil and natural gas production. Following that investment, the administration will reimburse the company “dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind.”
“Considering that the development of offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest, we have decided to renounce offshore wind development in the United States, in exchange for the reimbursement of the lease fees,” Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of TotalEnergies, said in a statement.
This refund-and-reinvest deal is the first of its kind. It signals a major shift in the Trump administration’s efforts to pivot the U.S. energy sector away from renewables. Its new strategy forgoes regulatory opposition in favor of financial incentives. While TotalEnergies won’t profit directly from the deal, it recouped its lease costs and likely avoided a costly legal battle by scrapping the projects.
We can expect the administration to pursue more deals like this as it fights to strengthen the fossil fuel industry—at the expense of public health and the environment. But as CVOW comes online and more projects keep advancing, the offshore wind industry is gaining momentum.
