Another day, another illegal billion-dollar bribe to raise your electricity prices

The Department of the Interior has been paying oil and gas companies to walk away from offshore wind projects, using taxpayer money to do it. The latest deal, announced this week, pays German energy company RWE $1.22 billion to cancel wind leases off New York and California. That follows earlier payments this year to TotalEnergies, Invenergy, and Duke Energy for similar cancellations. Altogether, more than $3.9 billion in taxpayer funds has gone toward shifting companies away from wind and toward gas and other fossil fuel projects. RWE says it will use the money to invest in a liquefied gas terminal in Louisiana and build new gas turbines to power data centers instead.

These deals come at a time when electricity demand is rising, partly driven by data centers, and average electricity bills hit their highest level on record this past July. Offshore wind is generally one of the cheaper sources of new power, so cancelling these projects removes supply at a moment when supply is already tight, which tends to push prices up rather than down. Coalitions of states, including New York and California, have sued or announced plans to sue over these agreements, arguing they are illegal, and courts have already blocked related permitting restrictions in the past.

None of this requires anything of homeowners right now. But it is worth knowing that decisions like these, made far from any single house, are part of why electricity bills have been climbing this year, and why the mix of power feeding the grid may keep shifting toward gas rather than wind in the near term.