From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with Katharine Kollins, the president of Southeastern Wind Coalition.

The Department of the Interior recently announced an agreement to pay the multinational company TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its offshore wind leases and instead invest in fossil fuel production in the U.S.

The federal government said it will reimburse TotalEnergies for money spent on U.S. oil, natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) production, up to the cost of the leases. The projects were to be located off the coasts of New York and North Carolina.

The payments are the latest move in the Trump administration’s campaign to stifle the offshore wind industry, months after a federal judge reversed its attempt to kill projects along the East Coast.

Now, several of those major offshore wind projects are coming online, including Revolution Wind in New England and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.

Katharine Kollins is the president of the advocacy group Southeastern Wind Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for wind energy across Southern states. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JENNI DOERING: What was your reaction when you heard the news of this $1 billion payment?

KATHARINE KOLLINS: I was surprised and disappointed. This is obviously another blow to offshore wind. We’ve seen a number of them throughout the current administration, and it’s really a dual blow to the taxpayer. Because you’ve got consumers both paying TotalEnergies back for nearly a billion dollars of a lease payment, and then higher long-term costs of a less-diverse and less-efficient energy mix.

DOERING: Supporters of the Trump administration deal with TotalEnergies say that this $1 billion is merely a refund on money that the company has paid the government, and so taxpayers are breaking even. What’s your response to that argument?

KOLLINS: My response to the argument is that these funds were already paid and accounted for, and I don’t think that those same folks would be supportive of the administration refunding the tax dollars that we all paid last year. Just because we’ve already paid something doesn’t mean that it is acceptable to then refund it a year later, when those funds were already allocated by the Treasury Department.

DOERING: The courts overturned the Trump administration’s order to shut down offshore wind projects on the grounds of national security. What do you make of this new strategy to pay companies like TotalEnergies to just give up their leases?

KOLLINS: It is a continuation of the president’s strategy to do whatever he can to cripple this industry. I think in the long run, it’s futile, because offshore wind is a much-needed energy generation source, especially on the East Coast, and it’s a phenomenal economic development tool. The fundamentals of offshore wind make sense for the U.S., but in the short term, he has made developing offshore wind very difficult and driven a lot of investors away from the U.S., away from offshore wind and toward other investments.

DOERING: What’s the economic impact of canceling offshore wind farms? Who wins and who loses?

KOLLINS: I would venture to say that we all lose because we are talking about over $30 billion of fully permitted economic activity just in the five projects that are currently under construction. That’s over $11 billion in supply chain assets that have spun up to support construction.

The reason that these manufacturing facilities are being developed and that manufacturers are looking at the U.S. is because the components are so large that they can only be transported on water, and so right now we are getting a lot of those components from Europe. They are being shipped to the U.S., where the U.S. hasn’t developed the manufacturing facilities as of yet, and then we’re installing these machines.

That said, if we can build a U.S.-based supply chain, we’re talking about at least $100 billion of potential economic activity.

DOERING: It sounds like these wind farms already make a lot of sense in terms of the energy they’re going to produce for the grid and jobs and installing them. And there’s even more opportunity in the future to build out these manufacturing hubs in port cities,

KOLLINS: Yes, and in order for companies to invest again the billions of dollars that are required to manufacture these extremely large components and specialized equipment on the coast, they need to know that there is a stable permitting regime. They need a concrete pipeline of projects that developers are willing to commit to and know that they can continue to build. And unfortunately, what we are seeing right now is an erosion of that. That means that we will likely need to continue to purchase at least the major turbine components from places like Europe.

DOERING: Given this country’s growing electricity demands, in part because of AI, how can offshore wind help feed the power grid, especially when some skeptics say “the wind doesn’t always blow?”

KOLLINS: One of the really amazing things about offshore wind is that it is generating electrons when we need them most—in the wintertime when it is cold, when natural gas is constrained and prices are high, on winter mornings when folks are switching on heating. It is also very highly correlated with winter storms.

What we’ve seen over the last few years with winter storms is gas prices become astronomical because of constrained supply; everybody is working very hard to heat their homes. If we had offshore wind on the grid during those periods, that is effectively a hedge to those very high fuel costs.

Offshore wind has already proven itself to be integral to the power grid, especially along the East Coast. There is an operating project, South Fork Wind, in the Northeast. Over the course of its first year of energy production, it showed that it was delivering electrons to the grid nearly all of the time, and it had over an 80 percent capacity factor during winter storms, when that electricity is needed most.

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DOERING: What is the current state of offshore wind off the Southeastern coast?

KOLLINS: Offshore wind in the Northeast has progressed much quicker than it has in the Southeast, because the Northeast has been fantastic about enacting state policies that both encourage offshore wind and also provide the level of certainty that these large infrastructure projects require to get off the ground.

The shining light is the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. It is the largest project in the U.S., at 2,600 megawatts, and that project is actively under construction. They just started delivering power to the grid, and we are very excited and proud in the Southeast to have such a phenomenal project bringing electricity to grids where it’s needed most.

DOERING: What made that project possible?

KOLLINS: Most energy policy is driven by states, and Virginia has been a huge supporter of offshore wind for a long time, so the state has invested in their ports. They have invested in offshore wind training development and made sure that the regulated utility, Dominion Virginia, was able to develop this project in a way that made sense for Virginians. This is the only project in the U.S. that has been developed by a regulated utility.

What that allowed in this specific case was for that utility to contract for their components in advance of the inflationary pressures that we saw in the early 2020s. This project has really been a shining light, because it is providing low-cost, reliable electricity into the PJM grid. PJM is the regional transmission organization that covers the state of Virginia, and that grid is already constrained in a number of ways, and very much looking forward to having the full capacity of the 2,600-megawatt project feeding electrons into their grid.

DOERING: What do you see as the future for offshore wind energy?

KOLLINS: The future globally is so strong. What I think a lot of Americans don’t recognize is that countries like China have over 50 gigawatts of offshore wind installed and under construction. That is as much as the U.S. could hope to build in 20 years. Europe has over 35 gigawatts of installed offshore wind. These countries already have very robust manufacturing supply chains, have already invested in their ports and are already building these domestic machines that are generating clean, free-fuel electricity for those countries.

The U.S. is really ceding both the economic development and the technological know-how to Europe and Asia by not investing in this technology domestically.

Editor’s note: Regarding the billion-dollar deal with TotalEnergies, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement: “Offshore wind is one of the most expensive, unreliable, environmentally disruptive, and subsidy-dependent schemes ever forced on American ratepayers and taxpayers. We welcome TotalEnergies’ commitment to developing projects that produce dependable, affordable power to lower Americans’ monthly bills while providing secure U.S. baseload power today—and in the future.”