State officials challenge withdrawal of $111 million floating offshore project in Morro Bay
Another round in the legal battle between California and the Trump administration over offshore wind projects has commenced.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Energy Commission filed a 54-page lawsuit in federal court Tuesday, disputing what they claim was an unlawful buyout that took a major offshore floating wind project in Morro Bay off the table.
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The filing marks the second legal complaint the Attorney General’s Office and the energy commission has filed against the Trump administration — and another lawsuit is looming.
Tuesday’s lawsuit challenges a $765 million buyback of four wind leases in locations across the country held by Invenergy, a Chicago-based international power generation company. Announced in June, the deal included the $111 million Even Keel Wind project that had lease rights covering more than 80,000 acres off the Central California coast.
“California is challenging these reckless and illegal backroom deals and holding the companies that participate in them accountable,” David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission, said in a statement.
As of 2:30 p.m., neither the U.S. Department of the Interior nor Invenergy had responded to emails from the Union-Tribune asking for comment on the lawsuit.
When the withdrawals were announced two months ago, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said, “The offshore wind leases were sold under the assumptions that taxpayers would indefinitely subsidize costly, unreliable projects and that no national security concerns were implicated — both assumptions have since been proven false.”
Under the terms of the deal, Invenergy will redirect the money to other energy projects that include developing natural gas power plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri, plus geothermal projects in the West.
An Invenergy executive at the time said the company “is focused on delivering reliable, affordable energy for our customers and supporting disciplined investment at scale.”
This is the second lawsuit California has filed in federal court.
The state attorney general and the energy commission submitted a similar complaint last month, accusing Interior and other agencies of making an “unconstitutional and unlawful” deal in April that saw another company — Golden State Wind LLC — back out of its lease to build a floating offshore wind farm, also in Morro Bay.
Instead, Golden State Wind will be eligible to recover the company’s $120 million investment by spending an equal amount on U.S. oil and gas assets, energy infrastructure or liquefied natural gas projects on the Gulf Coast.
In yet another buyback, German energy multinational RWE in August announced relinquishing offshore wind leases in New York, Louisiana and California as part of a $1.22 billion settlement with the Department of the Interior. One of those projects is the Canopy Offshore Wind Farm in Northern California’s Humboldt County.
Earlier this month, the California Attorney General’s Office sent a “notice of intent to sue” to officials at Interior and other federal agencies, as well as executives at RWE.
With the Invenergy, Golden State Wind and Canopy Offshore Wind Farm projects no longer on the drawing board, there are just two floating offshore lease projects left in California — one in Humboldt Bay and one in Morro Bay.
Click here to read the full article in the SD Union Tribune
Wind technologies are ineffective; the evidence is the numerous windmills in the Palm Springs area which has proven to be a disaster. Not only do they kill millions of birds, that is when they are working, they are an eyesore and produce very little energy. The technology is old already and they have no clue what to do with these unsightly and non-functioning giants. All of these windmills when and if they function probably only power a laptop for 3 hours. Before you Dems screw up our oceans since you have already polluted the environment in the desert you might want to rethink all of the expensive and stupid advances your crappy ideas do to the burden of your useless, costly and inept ideas all for “saving the environment” but rather advancing the destruction.