N.J. sues Trump administration over offshore wind cancellations, $1.4B for fossil fuel projects

New Jersey joined a coalition of states suing the Trump administration over its attempts to cancel two big offshore wind leases and pay the companies $1.4 billion to develop fossil fuel projects instead.

“This administration is paying developers to abandon building new sources of energy at a time when our grid needs more power to meet demand and residents need relief from high electricity prices,” New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in announcing the suit.

New Jersey joined New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont in two suits filed Tuesday in U.S. District Courts in Maine and New York.

The suits were filed by the states’ attorneys general against the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Justice. The states claim that the settlements attempting to cancel two leases for major wind power projects offshore of New Jersey are illegal.

The Trump administration is using a taxpayer-funded account meant to settle legal claims to pay for fossil fuel developments outside the states that had offshore wind projects planned, the suits state.

Davenport said that Trump can’t redirect those funds simply “because he favors the fossil fuel industry.”

At issue are offshore wind projects that were supposed to be built in the New York Bight, a section of ocean between Long Island and New Jersey, and projects that spanned other states.

The New York Bight, despite its name, is mostly off the New Jersey coast, stretching from Long Island to the Cape May inlet.

The companies purchased the wind power leases in federal auctions held by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) during the Biden administration. The BOEM manages any energy production in the Outer Continental Shelf several miles off the coast.

Chicago-based Invenergy won thousands of acres of offshore wind leases through BOEM auctions in 2022 and 2024 in the New York Bight and the Gulf of Maine.

It was part of what Biden administration called the “nation’s highest-grossing competitive offshore energy lease sale in history.”

» READ MORE: Six companies bid record $4.3 billion for N.J. and N.Y. offshore wind energy leases

The Invenergy leases were designed to produce around 5 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power about 2 million homes in New York, New Jersey, Maine, and Massachusetts.

In New Jersey, the project was known as Leading Light Wind.

In addition, Bluepoint Winds won a lease in 2022 in a project expected to generate 2.4 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 1.5 million homes in New York and New Jersey.

However, earlier this year, the Trump administration reached a settlement with Invenergy to end its offshore wind leases in exchange for $765 million in lease fee reimbursements, and the money would be put toward natural gas and geothermal projects.

And it reached a settlement with Bluepoint Winds Holdings to invest up to $765 million into a U.S.-based liquefied natural gas facility. In return, the Department of Interior said it would cancel the company’s offshore wind lease. Bluepoint Winds Holdings is jointly owned by OW North America LLC and Seaway Energy Holdings LP.

The Department of Interior sent a statement to The Inquirer on Tuesday saying that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

However, the statement said in reference to the lease cancellations that the “Department of War identified serious national security risks that demanded immediate attention — which critics conveniently ignore.”

The statement called the agreements with Invenergy and Bluepoint “voluntary” and said they were “reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice, underscoring that they went through the appropriate channels.”

Davenport disputes the Trump administration’s claim that the contracts were canceled for national security issues, which she said have never been specified.

“Any legitimate national security issues were already accounted for in the government’s original decision to award the leases and are routinely addressed through the federal permitting process that every offshore wind project must complete,” she said.

The suits filed Tuesday ask the courts to strike down the settlements and restore the leases.

The suits contend that the administration ignored federal procedure for canceling the leases, that it never held public hearings, that its actions were arbitrary and illegal, that it failed to complete an environmental-impact statement, and that money from the judgment fund cannot be used to pay the companies for their fossil fuel ventures.

Separately, New Jersey and other states sued the Trump administration in June over cancellation of a $795 million offshore wind lease with Attentive Energy that would have also brought power to the state.

The unwinding of New Jersey’s nascent offshore wind industry began rapidly when Trump took office in 2025 and began issuing executive orders that made exploring or building the renewable energy source untenable.

Those included other big offshore wind projects such as by those planned by Danish-run Orsted and Atlantic Shores, a partnership between Shell and EDF Renewables.

On his first day in office, Trump issued a temporary ban on offshore wind and within days personally attacked New Jersey’s quest to build wind farms, calling it “a disaster,” saying he wanted the projects “dead and gone.”