Trump's war on wind loses in court, five for five — but the buyouts kill the projects anyway

Climate & Energy 4 min 5 sources

The administration lost every legal fight to stop offshore wind, then simply paid $2.6bn to cancel the leases instead. Plus: a hedge-fund owner piles into fossil fuels, a US utility swaps coal for gas, and Cuba's grid goes dark.

Key takeaways

Trump's administration lost every court case against offshore wind but is cancelling the projects anyway — by paying developers $2.6bn to abandon their own leases.
Globally the money is moving toward clean energy, not away: the IEA reports roughly twice as much investment now flows into green energy as into fossil fuels.
A grid with no spare capacity fails all at once — Cuba's national power system collapsed this week for reasons still unknown.

The projects won in court, then got bought out

The Trump administration has lost every court fight it picked with US offshore wind — and it is winning anyway.

Since taking office, the president has issued an executive order to halt all wind leases and permits, tried to stop projects mid-construction, and cited national security, dead birds, dead whales, and cancer as reasons [1]. Judges struck down all five stop-work orders on projects near Rhode Island — “five for five,” as the state’s AFL-CIO chief put it [1]. In June, the administration abandoned its court challenge to the executive order entirely, giving up after a judge tossed it [1].

So it switched tactics. Instead of blocking the projects, the Interior Department is buying out the leases — paying energy companies to cancel their own wind farms. Four deals so far, more than $2.6bn in taxpayer money: $765m to Invenergy to abandon four projects in California, New York, and Maine, and nearly $900m to two developers to cancel offshore leases in New York and California [1].

The damage isn’t only to the projects. Thomas Kilday, a furnace electrician who worked on Revolution Wind off the Atlantic coast, had a stop-work order dropped on him mid-shift. “You plan your whole life around being gone for 28 days, and to come out here and have it thrown up in the air” [1]. Revolution Wind is now over 90% built and delivering power to more than 350,000 New England homes — with more than 1,000 union workers on it [1]. Workers on the completed Vineyard Wind 1 say they’re trained, certified, and idle. “Why take those jobs away?” one asked [1].

The point worth holding: you don’t have to win the case to win the fight. Every stop-work order was overturned, but the freeze already happened — the delay, the uncertainty, the 90-day halts came whether or not the government prevailed. And the buyout is the same move by other means. A lease that’s been cancelled doesn’t need a legal argument.

The money is quietly betting the other way

While the policy fights wind, some of the money is moving toward fossil fuels — and being loud about it.

A Guardian analysis found Marshall Wace, the hedge fund whose co-owner Paul Marshall also owns GB News, roughly quadrupled the value of its fossil-fuel holdings in one quarter, from $196m at the end of December to $864m at the end of March [2]. Over the same three months, its stake in renewable energy and battery companies fell 30% [2]. The fund called the analysis “partial and inaccurate” but gave no alternative figures [2].

Here’s the context that matters. Globally, the money is going the opposite way. The International Energy Agency — the West’s energy watchdog — reports that clean-energy investment is rising fast while fossil-fuel investment stagnates, with roughly twice as much money now flowing into green energy as into fossil fuels [2]. One hedge fund leaning into oil and gas is a bet against that tide, not a sign of it turning.

Coal out, gas in — the slower swap

Not every fossil story is a reversal. In Arizona, the utility APS said it will convert coal-burning units to natural gas, adding 380 megawatts of gas-fired capacity [3]. Its reason was blunt: demand for round-the-clock power is climbing, and new generation takes years to build, so converting an existing plant is the fastest option available [3].

This is the unglamorous middle of the energy transition. Gas burns cleaner than coal but is still a fossil fuel — retiring coal for gas cuts emissions without ending them. When a grid needs reliable power now and can’t wait years for something new, the near-term choice is often the less-bad fossil fuel, not the clean one.

The renewable promise that couldn’t be kept

A related tension surfaced in Scotland. A Guardian investigation found that an £8.2bn AI datacentre in Lanarkshire — announced in January as powered “entirely from on-site renewables” — has no realistic prospect of meeting that promise [4]. Government and developers privately acknowledged the site had a power-supply “issue” [4]. The complex would need roughly a nuclear reactor’s worth of power, and on-site renewables can’t deliver it [4].

The pattern is familiar from this beat: the electricity a big new user demands has to come from somewhere, and “we’ll build clean power on site” is easy to announce and hard to deliver. When the clean option can’t keep up, the load doesn’t vanish — it gets met some other way.

And the grid that simply fell over

The under-covered story: Cuba’s entire national electric grid collapsed this week, and officials said the cause was unknown [5]. A whole country went dark at once.

A grid is a single connected machine — when one large piece fails and there’s no spare capacity to catch it, the failure can cascade across the whole system in seconds. Cuba’s grid has been fragile for years, running old plants with little margin. A system with no slack fails all at once, not gracefully.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

You don't have to win the case to win the fight

When the real weapon is delay, a court can rule against you five times and the damage is already done — because the harm lands during the fight, not at the verdict.

Five for five, and it didn’t matter

A US government agency picked five legal fights to stop offshore wind farms. It lost all five. Judges struck down every stop-work order. Then it gave up its biggest case entirely, walking away after a judge threw it out.

By any scoreboard, wind won. And yet the projects it was fighting are the ones in trouble, workers are idle, and the government is now paying billions to cancel the very leases it couldn’t legally stop.

How do you lose every round and still get what you wanted? Because winning the case was never the plan. The plan was the fight itself.

The harm arrives before the ruling does

Think about what a stop-work order does the day it’s issued, months before any judge reads it.

A worker on a 28-day shift at sea suddenly doesn’t know if he’ll be paid next week. A company with a half-built wind farm has to freeze, send people home, and wait. Financing gets shakier. Contractors line up other work. None of that unwinds when the order is struck down 90 days later. The 90 days are gone. The uncertainty already did its job.

This is the thing the courtroom scoreboard hides. A ruling settles who was right. It doesn’t refund the time, the money, the nerves spent while the question was open. When the point of the fight is to make something painful to continue, you don’t need the ruling to go your way. You just need the fight to last.

The rule assumes the fight ends when it ends

Our whole idea of fairness rests on a quiet assumption: that the contest is over when the judge decides. You break a rule, you’re punished; you follow it, you’re fine; the verdict draws the line.

But that assumption only holds if the cost lands at the verdict. When most of the cost lands during the process — in delay, in doubt, in stalled work — the verdict is almost beside the point. The person who can start the fight has already collected most of what they wanted before anyone rules on whether they were allowed to.

This is why “we won in court” can be true and hollow at the same time. The system was built to answer who is right. It was not built to answer who can afford to wait. And whoever can outlast the other has a weapon the rulebook doesn’t see, because it isn’t written down anywhere as a weapon. It just looks like the normal, slow grinding of due process.

When one door closes, the same move walks through another

After the government lost in court, it didn’t stop. It switched to buying out the leases — paying developers to cancel their own projects. Different mechanism, same goal. The court blocked one path; the pressure simply found another.

That’s the second half of this. A weapon made of delay and cost isn’t tied to any one tactic. Stop-work orders, appeals, buyouts, permit reviews — these are interchangeable tools serving one aim. Beat one in court and the aim doesn’t die; it reappears wearing a different procedure. You can’t defeat a strategy by defeating a single tactic, any more than you plug a leak by patching the one spot where the water happens to be showing.

Who else is standing in this

It’s easy to read this as a story about wind farms and move on. But the shape of it reaches much wider, and it reaches you.

Anyone who plans around a future — a job that pays for years, a project that finishes in 2030, a loan that assumes a stable rule — is exposed to exactly this. You don’t need someone to stop your plan. You only need someone able to make your future uncertain enough that you can’t safely commit to it. A landlord who won’t say whether he’ll renew. A policy that might change, or might not. A case that could drag on, or could settle. In each, the person waiting for certainty is the one who pays, and the person who can keep the question open holds the power — without ever having to win.

We tend to trust that being in the right protects us. Often it does. But being in the right protects you at the verdict, and a great deal of life is lived before the verdict, in the long open middle where nothing is settled and the bills still come. The unionised electrician was right, the courts agreed, and he’s still standing on the dock with his certifications unused, waiting.

Seeing this doesn’t hand you a way out of it. It mostly hands you humility about a fairness you thought you could count on. Sometimes the honest question isn’t am I right — it’s who here can afford to keep this open the longest. And more often than we’d like, that’s a different question with a different answer, and we don’t get to pick which one decides.

03 · Lab · your turn

The War of Attrition

Rehearse fighting a battle you keep winning on the law while the fight itself drains you — and feel why the verdict isn't where the harm lands.

04 · Hope · carry this

The fights are loud, but the turbines that got built are already turning — Revolution Wind is powering 350,000 homes tonight, raised by people proud of the work. Delay can stall a project, but it can't unbuild the ones that made it through, and the money keeps flowing toward what works.