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RWE trails potential legal action against US over offshore wind

CEO of German power giant said US cannot take payments for offshore wind project areas and then stand in way of developing them

Krebber also ruled out the idea of RWE stepping in to snap up lease areas recently abanonded by Mitsubishi in Japan.
Krebber also ruled out the idea of RWE stepping in to snap up lease areas recently abanonded by Mitsubishi in Japan.Photo: RWE/Andre Laaks
Journalist

RWE chief Markus Krebber has raised the prospect of legal action against the US over lease payments made for an offshore wind site the utility has been forced to pull the plug on amid President Donald Trump’s war on the sector.

Krebber, CEO of the German power giant and offshore wind developer, was discussing the Community Offshore Wind array it had been developing with the UK’s National Grid in the New York Bight.

The partners won a lease in a 2022 auction for the 126,000-acre (510 sq. km) area 103km south of New York's coastline, the most ever for acreage in US offshore wind.

The partners paid a record $1.1bn for that site, thought to be able to host around 3.3GW of offshore wind capacity. RWE owns a roughly 73% stake in the project, with National Grid holding the remainder.

However, RWE put the project on hold along with the rest of its US offshore wind development activities late last year, after Trump had won re-election but before he returned to the White House and launched an all-out assault on the sector.
Trump paused all new offshore wind leasing on his first day back in office - which RWE said did not come as a surprise - and his administration has targeted existing projects by pulling permits and issuing stop work orders, including to Danish developer Orsted’s Revolution Wind array last month.
This prompted accusations that Trump is using stop work orders as a means to extorting concessions from the states and developers involved, and that the US is becoming a “banana republic” under his leadership.
London-based National Grid booked a £303m ($402m) impairment on Community Offshore Wind in May.
Speaking last week, Krebber reiterated that RWE had “pulled the plug” on Community Offshore Wind, in comments reported in Reuters.

But Krebber said he sees no need to write down the project, which has a reported book value of €800m ($937m).

If political opposition persists against the offshore wind sector, he said that this could become a matter for the courts, as lease payments have already been made for the site, reported Reuters.

"If the investment opportunity is frustrated, then we need to talk about the lease payments," he said.

"It cannot be that the federal government says, ‘I will allow you to build offshore in my waters, but in return I want payments from you’, and then once the payments have been made, it says, ‘It's no longer possible.’”

Krebber also reportedly ruled out RWE stepping in to claim any of the three offshore wind sites in Japan that Mitsubishi-led consortia abandoned last week.
Those sites were awarded in Japan’s first offshore wind tender, with RWE among a clutch of European developers that secured lease areas in a second round concluded in 2023.
(Copyright)

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Published 1 September 2025, 10:22Updated 1 September 2025, 10:22
RWEGermanyUSNorth AmericaDonald Trump