Posted on August 19, 2026
President Donald Trump promised to sign an executive order on his first day back in office that would kill offshore wind. In the Gulf of Mexico, his administration finally achieved that goal — more than 500 days later — by promising to sign something else: a very big check.
The Trump administration agreed to pay German energy company RWE more than $1.2 billion to abandon its offshore wind projects in the United States, including the only one planned in the Gulf’s federal waters.
Under the agreement announced last week, RWE will give up plans for a 2,000-megawatt wind farm south of Louisiana, as well as projects off the coasts of New York and California. The Gulf project could have powered more than 350,000 homes.
“After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” RWE said in a statement.
Offshore wind advocates called the agreement a major blow to U.S. renewable energy development and Louisiana’s hopes of expanding its offshore energy industry.
“This decision walks back years of development and stymies economic opportunity for the state,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, adding that the Trump administration should be supporting options for domestic energy production, “not removing them.”
The Trump administration has now bought out about a dozen offshore wind leases, paying developers nearly $4 billion. The $1.2 billion RWE agreement is the biggest payout yet.
RWE is the world’s second largest offshore wind developer, operating 19 wind farms in five countries with a total capacity of 6,200 megawatts. In late 2023, the company paid $5.6 million for the right to develop a wind project in the Gulf’s first-ever offshore wind lease auction. The lease area covered 102,000 acres about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Another lease area along the Texas coast drew no bids despite it boasting stronger winds. RWE said Louisiana’s political support for offshore wind development and its large offshore energy workforce, long focused on oil and gas, steered its interest toward the state.
Louisiana had set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office in 2024.
Louisiana companies with ties to the offshore oil and gas industry helped build the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. They had secured several engineering and construction contracts for wind farms taking shape on the East Coast.
RWE expected to tap into this workforce to build its Louisiana project before 2035. It also had a customer for its wind power. Before securing its lease, RWE signed an agreement with Entergy to deliver electricity to customers in Texas and Louisiana.
It’s unclear what the project’s economic impact might have been, but a 2020 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that a smaller, hypothetical wind farm near Lake Charles would create nearly 4,500 construction jobs and generate $445 million in goods and services. Once operating, the project would support 150 jobs and inject about $14 million into the region’s economy.
While offshore wind development flourished under former President Joe Biden, Trump has taken an increasingly hard line against the industry. His disdain for wind turbines appears to date to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil views from a golf course he planned to develop. Trump lost the battle and was eventually ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees.
Trump has since frequently derided wind energy, portraying offshore turbines as threats to property values and wildlife while making more outlandish claims about the technology. He has suggested that wind turbines drive up food prices, interrupt TV watching, cause cancer and even drive people insane.
He initially tried to halt offshore wind development through executive action, but federal judges blocked those efforts. Trump then turned to a more expensive strategy: paying developers to walk away.
The settlements don’t merely pay companies to abandon wind projects. Many also require them to redirect investment toward fossil fuels favored by the administration. As part of the deal brokered with RWE, the company will invest $900 million to acquire a stake in a planned liquefied natural gas terminal near Lake Charles. The project, known as Louisiana LNG, would be one of the largest LNG export terminals in the country, and one of the state’s largest sources of climate-warming pollution.
RWE also agreed to spend $300 million to reserve natural gas turbines for use in new natural gas-fired power plants.
An RWE spokesman said this element of the agreement “best serves the interests of stakeholders” and allows the company to “direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.”
Environmental groups have condemned the settlements as a waste of taxpayer money that eliminates renewable energy projects while steering private investment toward fossil fuels. More than 50 groups urged RWE not to give in to the administration’s “fossil fuel whims” before the company reached its $1.2 billion agreement.
Madelyn Smith, a program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition, said there’s still reason to believe wind turbines could one day spin over the Gulf’s waters.
In 2023, two companies signed agreements with Louisiana regulators to build small wind farms in state-managed waters. Louisiana granted Danish firm Vestas about 60,000 acres south of Cameron Parish while Mitsubishi subsidiary Diamond Offshore Wind secured more than 6,000 acres near Port Fourchon.
The Mitsubishi-led wind farm appears to have quietly died. It is no longer featured on Diamond’s website, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. But the project near Cameron is still alive, if somewhat stalled, Smith said.
A wind farm on the scale RWE envisioned could be revived relatively quickly, she said. Much of the siting and feasibility work has already been done, and another federal lease sale could be organized with ease. For now, she said, the main obstacle is Trump.
“There’s still hope under a different administration,” she said.
