The Chicago based developer is the third major energy company to surrender offshore wind leases for Trump administration payment, and says the proceeds will fund next generation geothermal projects and new natural gas fired power plants.
The Trump administration has now arranged a federal cash payout to a third major energy developer for walking away from offshore wind leases. The pattern is harder to miss with each new announcement. Chicago-based megadeveloper Invenergy agreed on Wednesday to relinquish four offshore wind leases off the coasts of California, Maine, and New York, and the U.S. Interior Department will pay the company $765 million in exchange, according to reporting by Maria Gallucci at Canary Media.
What makes the Invenergy deal different is where the money goes next. The company says it will spend the proceeds on both next-generation geothermal power projects and new natural gas-fired power plants, a different energy mix than the offshore wind it is leaving behind. That choice turns a single corporate retreat into an early look at what the federal government is paying to be built in place of offshore wind.
Invenergy is the third major energy developer to trade offshore wind leases for federal payment from the Trump administration. TotalEnergies was promised nearly $1 billion to walk away from its plans to install turbines near North Carolina and in waters off New York and New Jersey. Ocean Winds later inked agreements worth nearly $900 million to relinquish offshore wind leases on the eastern and western U.S. coasts. The cumulative value of the three federal payouts now exceeds $2.6 billion — capital redirected away from the offshore wind the leases once promised toward other energy builds. What is clear from this deal alone is that the federal payouts are large enough to seed entirely new buildouts elsewhere in the energy economy. Whether the geothermal side of the announcement amounts to a serious industrial bet or a thin public rationale for gas-plant construction is the open question.
The technology is the part the announcement does not pin down. Geothermal power draws heat from underground rock formations to drive turbines, and the "next-generation" label in 2026 typically signals a move beyond traditional hydrothermal sites toward harder-to-reach hot rock formations. Invenergy has not said publicly which approach it intends to use, where the first projects would be sited, or which partners, if any, it would work with. Without those specifics, the geothermal commitment functions as a directional signal rather than a near-term pipeline.
The gas-plant funding is the more concrete story in the near term. Natural gas turbines can be permitted and built on a faster timeline than either offshore wind farms or first-of-a-kind geothermal projects, which means the $765M is likeliest to translate into operating capacity on the grid through gas plants before any geothermal power ever flows. Pairing the two announcements in the same press cycle tells two different stories about what the country is putting in place of the offshore wind the leases once promised.
The legal and political context around these buyouts remains unsettled. Some Democratic lawmakers have characterized these deals as illegal payouts meant to push firms out of the offshore wind sector, which was once the cornerstone of decarbonization plans in the Northeast but has now been decimated by the Trump administration's repeated attacks. Seven Democratic-led states are suing to stop one of Interior's deals with TotalEnergies. Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, said in a Wednesday statement: "We have a chance to build cheap, reliable power right off our own coasts. Instead this administration is paying top dollar to walk away from it, tying our energy future to the vagaries of volatile markets and handing the bill to families already paying too much." Whether the geothermal half of the announcement moves past a press release, and how the legal pressure on prior buybacks plays out, will shape whether this is remembered as a federal redirection of clean-energy capital or as a more expensive way to fund gas.
Not every offshore wind project in the United States is following the same path. The Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island went online in early 2026 despite repeated Trump administration attempts over the previous year and a half to halt construction, per the same Canary Media reporting. It is a reminder that some developers are still choosing to build rather than cash out.