Offshore Wind Lease Buyout Tracker

Running totals

Every agreement, newest first

How these deals actually work

Not necessarily. The figure represents money the government has agreed to reimburse, not money confirmed paid out. Several agreements are expressly contingent: Interior cancels the lease and reimburses the original bid only after the company invests an equal amount in fossil-fuel infrastructure first. Interior's own releases avoid the word "buyback," describing the deals as terminating leases and reimbursing bid payments.

The pattern is consistent across the ledger: a developer relinquishes a lease it won at a federal auction, the government reimburses the bid payment, and the company commits an equivalent sum to oil, gas, or LNG. Two developers took less than they paid — Duke Energy is recovering $129 million on a lease it bought for $155 million, and RWE roughly $1.22 billion on leases that cost about $1.26 billion. The money comes from the Justice Department's Judgment Fund rather than a program Congress appropriated for the purpose, which is part of what the legal challenges are about.

What the leases would have built

Interior's releases do not state generating capacity, so every megawatt figure in this ledger comes from developers or trade press and should be attributed that way. The best-supported individual numbers are RWE's Community Offshore Wind and TotalEnergies' Attentive Energy at roughly 3 GW each, Leading Light Wind and Bluepoint Wind at 2.4 GW each, Golden State Wind at about 2 GW, and Duke's Carolina Long Bay at up to 1.6 GW.

Adding those up is where reporting gets unreliable: sources differ on several leases, and two of Invenergy's Gulf of Maine leases are research-scale rather than commercial. The BlueGreen Alliance puts the cumulative total at 21.15 GW, which is consistent with a bottom-up sum but is an advocacy tracker's figure, not a government one. Treat any single aggregate capacity number as attributed, not established.

Legal and political challenges

Seven states — New York, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont — sued in federal court in June 2026 over the TotalEnergies lease cancellations. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse opened an inquiry in April focused on the use of the Judgment Fund, telling the Associated Press the deals take “billions of dollars out of consumers' pockets.” Elizabeth Klein, who directed BOEM from 2023 to 2025, told Canary Media there are “significant questions about under what authority Interior is doing this.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has defended the agreements, saying Americans “deserve an energy system built on common sense, not one dependent on costly subsidies or technologies that can't meet our country's current demand.”

Frequently asked questions

Which companies gave up offshore wind leases, and how many each?

Twelve leases, held by six companies, across five announcement rounds — the numbers are easy to conflate. TotalEnergies gave up two leases, Invenergy four, RWE three, and Bluepoint Wind, Golden State Wind, and Duke Energy one each. The largest single agreement is RWE's $1.22 billion deal in August 2026, which cleared its entire remaining US offshore wind portfolio.

Is this the same as offshore wind projects being cancelled?

Not quite. These are federal seabed leases being terminated before construction, which is different from a permitted project halted mid-build. The practical effect is the same for the pipeline — the projects will not be built — but the ledger here counts lease agreements, not construction stoppages.