28 Aug 2026

Trump's War on Wind: The Billion-Dollar LNG Detour

By EVWorld.com AI Editorial Team

Offshore wind was supposed to be the quiet revolution. Turbines spinning miles off the coast, feeding clean power into the grid while the Gulf warms and wildfire smoke turns sunsets blood-red. Instead, under a Trump-era deal, the breeze got monetized and redirected. German energy giant RWE walked away from three offshore wind projects with a $1.2 billion settlement, and roughly $900 million of that is now aimed straight at a liquefied natural gas terminal tied to one of Trump's well-connected neighbors.

The project is Louisiana LNG, a sprawling export facility on the Gulf Coast. RWE isn't building it from scratch; it's buying a major stake. That stake comes from Stonepeak, a private-equity infrastructure firm co-founded by Australian-born billionaire Michael Dorrell. Dorrell isn't just a name in an SEC filing. He owns an 11-bedroom mansion on a private island near Mar-a-Lago and has bragged about sitting just a few meters from the president at the club, soaking in the spectacle like a VIP at a reality show taping.

Campaign finance records show that after Trump's 2024 victory, Dorrell wrote two checks totaling about $1 million to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee. That's not the kind of money you send if you want a yard sign; it's the kind you send when you expect to be remembered. Now, in the wake of the offshore wind settlement, the biggest single chunk of RWE's reinvestment is flowing into a project where Dorrell's firm has been a key player.

On paper, the settlement looks like technocratic housekeeping: RWE abandons troubled offshore wind leases, gets paid from a federal fund, and agrees to reinvest in "conventional energy" projects like oil, gas, and nuclear. In practice, it's a pivot away from renewables and toward fossil fuels, with taxpayers cushioning the landing. Offshore wind, already bruised by permitting delays and political hostility, gets sidelined. Liquefied natural gas, the darling of the "energy dominance" crowd, gets a nine-figure boost.

The Trump camp insists there's nothing shady here. Interior officials say they didn't steer RWE toward Louisiana LNG or Stonepeak. The former White House calls criticism "a brazen attempt to insinuate a conflict of interest that does not exist." RWE says it chose the project independently, based on what could be advanced "with certainty" in a volatile policy landscape where climate priorities swing with each election.

On Capitol Hill, the mood is different. Representative Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, was already investigating nearly $4 billion in similar settlements that have wiped out a dozen offshore wind projects. Learning that $900 million from one of those deals is tied to a Mar-a-Lago neighbor, he blasted the arrangements as "fake," "an insane waste of taxpayer funds," and now carrying "the stench of corruption." His probe is widening, and several states are suing to unwind the settlements altogether.

Strip away the legalese and the talking points, and the pattern is stark. Offshore wind, clean and future-facing, gets strangled before it can scale. LNG, carbon-heavy but lucrative, gets showered with public money. And somewhere on that private island off Palm Beach, a man who bet big on Trump and on gas watches the political winds shift, knowing that for now, they're still blowing his way.

Key URLs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/
https://heatmap.news/
https://www.fec.gov/
https://www.stonepeak.com/

Original Source

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