Saving Seafood

Trump Administration to Buy Back Four More Offshore Wind Leases

June 18, 2026 — Continuing its strategy of canceling offshore wind projects by buying back the leases in exchange for other energy investments, the Department of the Interior announced its third agreement. The administration has committed nearly $2.6 billion to canceling offshore wind leases even as the strategy is being challenged in court and by regulators.

Invenergy will voluntarily terminate four offshore wind leases it purchased in the past from the government and will redirect the investments toward other domestic energy sources, said the Department of the Interior. It valued the four leases at $765 million for one lease in the New York Bight for a New Jersey wind farm, two for floating offshore wind farms in Maine, and one off the coast of California.

The largest and most advanced of the projects was Leading Light Wind, which had submitted its offshore wind project bid to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) in August 2023. It called for up to 2.4 GW, which would have made it the largest in the United States. It would have been more than 40 miles off the coast near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and included a battery storage option that would provide 253 MW of advanced energy storage, but it had yet to submit a Construction and Operations Plan proposal to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

VIRGINIA: Dominion Energy renews deal with Virginia Beach to buy land for more offshore wind

June 17, 2026 — The utility would use onshore infrastructure at the site for a wind farm off the Outer Banks.

The Virginia Beach Development Authority last week approved an option agreement with Dominion Energy for land that could support a future offshore wind project.

The deal allows the utility to buy about 30 acres at Corporate Landing Business Park within the next five years, which it could use for an onshore substation and grid interconnection point.

It is not related to the 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, or CVOW, currently under construction about 27 miles east of the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.

Dominion’s eyeing the land for another possible project about 25 miles south, in North Carolina. The lease area, which the utility calls CVOW South, is located off the Outer Banks coast.

Read the full article the WHRO

NORTH CAROLINA: Dominion to buy land for North Carolina offshore wind project

June 12, 2026 — Dominion Energy will purchase 32 acres in a Virginia Beach business park for an onshore substation and grid connection point to serve a wind farm project planned off the coast of North Carolina.

The land sale in Corporate Landing Business Park was approved at a Development Authority meeting on Tuesday. The authority owns the property and had originally approved Dominion’s purchase option in 2019, but the agreement expired last year. The purchase price will be based on a forthcoming appraisal, but the agreement guarantees it will exceed $6 million, or at least $200,000 per acre.

Read the full article at Yahoo! News

RHODE ISLAND: SouthCoast Wind can lay its cable in RI waters, if it ever gets built

June 11, 2026 — SouthCoast Wind is on hold at the federal level, but Rhode Island regulators are still clearing the way for plans to connect the proposed 141-turbine offshore wind farm to the regional power grid.

The state Coastal Resources Management Council on June 9 approved a request by developer Ocean Winds to run a pair of transmission cables across 20 miles of Rhode Island state waters.

The cables would lead from its wind farm of up to 2,400 megawatts of capacity that would be built 23 miles south of Nantucket and head up the Sakonnet River, through Common Fence Point in Portsmouth and across Mount Hope Bay to a substation at Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts.

Read the full article at the Newport Daily News

RHODE ISLAND: CRMC approves key SouthCoast Wind permit over objections from fishing industry

June 11, 2026 — The murky future for SouthCoast Wind gained a small but significant sign of clarity Tuesday with a key permit approval from the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC).

The panel’s unanimous vote — the first decision made by the newly retooled council —- followed a four-hour series of expert presentations and public comments on the impacts of the underwater cable lines in Rhode Island waters. The center of the project — 141 turbines generating more than 1,200 megawatts of wind-powered electricity at nameplate capacity — sits more than 60 miles south of Rhode Island’s coastline, closer to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. But project developers needed permission from Ocean State regulators to run power lines from the turbines to the electric grid, snaking up the Sakonnet River, underneath Island Park in Portsmouth and out Mount Hope Bay to reach land at Brayton Point in Somerset, Massachusetts.

When and whether the high-voltage cables ever come through Rhode Island remains unclear; SouthCoast is one of many offshore wind projects facing unforeseen setbacks since President Donald Trump took office in January 2026. The developer hasn’t lined up a buyer for its product, though Massachusetts power providers are expected to announce a decision on a potential deal by the end of the month. Rhode Island Energy was initially interested in procuring a small piece of the project power, too, but broke off contract negotiations after multiple delays, citing federal policy uncertainty.

Federal regulators with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have also revoked a key federal permit tied to the project and are still reviewing whether to reissue the permit with new conditions — if at all.

Fishermen, municipalities and conservative-funded interest groups noted the federal uncertainty in 90 pages of opposition letters to coastal regulators. Far more pressing for critics, however, was the potential environmental harms to native species and habitats where the developer wants to drill and bury the power lines, and the commercial and recreational fishing community that depends on those habitats.

Read the full article at the News From the States

Global offshore wind capacity set to grow to 420 GW by end of 2035, GWEC report says

June 9, 2026 — Global offshore wind capacity is set to quadruple over the next decade to reach ​420 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2035, ‌a report by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) showed on Tuesday.

  • Around 92 GW of offshore wind was installed by ​the end of 2025, enough to power ​around 100 million homes.
  • More than 327 GW of ⁠new offshore wind capacity is forecast to be ​added in the next decade, taking global offshore ​wind capacity to 420 GW by the end of 2035, the report said.

Read the full article at Reuters

VIRGINIA: Virginia offshore wind panel discusses Dominion, potential for future projects

June 8, 2026 — No Dominion Energy representative was in attendance at the Virginia Offshore Wind Development Authority meeting earlier this week – even as the utility hopes state regulators sign off on a massive merger.

The panel, which was established in 2010, works to foster development of the industry through research and makes recommendations to help projects reach fruition.

Dominion and NextEra Energy announced a merger in May, which will be subject to “detailed scrutiny” from state regulators in Virginia and North Carolina before being finalized.

Read the full article at WHRO

Fishermen advocate begins campaign against offshore wind, ‘industrializing’ of the ocean

June 8, 2026 — The New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association began a campaign to bring attention to what it says is a radical climate activism’s “industrializing” of the ocean through green energy agendas and the disastrous effect such objectives have on commercial fishermen’s livelihoods.

President of the fishermen advocacy Aaron Williams told The Center Square that his organization’s campaign “is intended to bring attention to the growing concerns many commercial fishermen, seafood producers, and coastal communities have regarding the rapid expansion of offshore wind development in productive fishing grounds.”

Read the full article at the Center Square

7 states sue Trump administration over nearly $1 billion deal to halt offshore wind farm

June 3, 2026 — Seven states are suing the Trump administration over a nearly $1 billion deal to end French energy company TotalEnergies’ offshore wind development off the East Coast, accusing the deal of being “unlawful.”

In March, the U.S. Department of the Interior reached a $928 million deal with TotalEnergies to halt construction of the wind farms and redirect the investment into domestic fossil fuel initiatives. The “landmark agreement” was described by the Interior Department as a way to lower energy costs and strengthen the nation’s energy security.

Attorneys general in seven states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, alleging the Trump administration illegally used nearly $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for the deal.

The coalition also accuses the deal of violating the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which restricts the Interior Department’s ability to cancel offshore wind leases.

Read the full article at ABC News

Blue States Sue Trump Administration Over Offshore Wind Deal

June 3, 2026 — Seven Democratic-controlled states sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its move to block a planned wind farm off the coast of New York.

The lawsuit seeks to overturn an extraordinary deal that the Trump administration reached in March with the French energy giant TotalEnergies. That agreement saw the government pay TotalEnergies $928 million to abandon plans to build the wind project off New York and another one off North Carolina.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed the suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Ms. James, a Democrat, said in a statement that the deal violated at least two federal laws and that it would harm New York’s economy and power grid.

“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,” she said. “We are fighting back to stop this illegal agreement that threatens to erase over a thousand union jobs and cheat millions of New Yorkers out of clean, affordable energy.”

Read the full article at The New York Times