Duke Energy and Interior Department Agree to End Carolina Long Bay Offshore Wind Lease

A Quiet Exit From Carolina Long Bay

On Monday, June 29, 2026, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that Duke Energy will voluntarily give up its federal lease for the Carolina Long Bay offshore wind project, planned about 22 miles south of Bald Head Island off Brunswick County, North Carolina ^[1][3]. The lease, won at a 2022 federal auction run by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is now valued at $129 million, and Duke says it will reinvest an equivalent amount in other in-state power — new nuclear generation, natural gas, and electric grid upgrades — by the end of the year ^[1][2].

The announcement marks the fourth offshore-wind lease buyout struck under the Trump administration, a national program that, with the Duke deal included, has now redirected more than $2.7 billion away from offshore wind ^[1][6]. What looks on its face like a single utility's business decision sits at the center of a much larger fight over how the country meets fast-rising electricity demand.

What Both Sides Concede

Strip away the framing and a core set of facts is undisputed. A Duke Energy affiliate won the eastern Carolina Long Bay lease at the May 2022 BOEM auction with a bid of roughly $155 million ^[1]. The project was sited about 22 miles south of Bald Head Island and was projected to power more than 300,000 homes ^[1][3]. The lease now carries a value of $129 million, the figure named in the termination agreement, and Duke has publicly committed to put an equivalent sum into nuclear, gas, and grid projects across the Carolinas ^[1][2].

It is also undisputed that Duke had already stepped back from offshore wind well before this deal. In August 2025, the utility declined to move the project forward, citing an independent review that found offshore wind "not cost-competitive at this time" ^[9]. And the legal backdrop is settled: in December 2025, a federal judge vacated the administration's earlier blanket halt on offshore-wind approvals, ruling it "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act while explicitly declining to find it unconstitutional ^[12]. Only after that ruling did Interior pivot to these negotiated, voluntary settlements.

The Pressure Underneath

Beneath the matching press releases run pressures that do not fully reconcile. The administration needs a durable, consent-based mechanism to deliver a signature promise to curb offshore wind, now that a court has struck down the blunt approach as unlawful — negotiated lease terminations are that workaround, and they are far harder to overturn in court ^[12]. Duke's overriding driver is its lowest-cost path to meet surging load; offshore wind's high capital cost made the lease easy to drop once both federal and state climate pressure eased ^[2][9].

Clean-energy and wind advocates, for their part, are fighting to keep these buyouts from hardening into a repeatable template that dismantles the U.S. offshore-wind pipeline and its supply chain ^[10][11]. The material reality cuts across all of it: a real, permitted lease capable of powering roughly 300,000 homes will not be built, the money tied to it shifts toward nuclear, gas, and grid, and Duke now plans no new wind before 2040, leaning instead on solar and gas ^[1][5][9]. Regional power demand keeps climbing regardless, and whatever replaces the project carries its own cost, reliability, and emissions profile.

How the Administration and Duke See It

The Trump administration and Secretary Burgum present the deal as sound stewardship. Offshore wind, they argue, is among the most expensive ways to add power, and relinquishing an uneconomic lease while steering the money to dispatchable nuclear and gas plus grid upgrades improves reliability and lowers bills — a voluntary, market-validated choice that advances the administration's "energy dominance" agenda ^[1][3]. Their incentive is plain: deliver on a campaign promise through consensual settlements that survive legal challenge, while channeling investment toward favored projects, reinforcing the administration's energy brand and a national program now exceeding $2.7 billion ^[1][6].

Duke frames it as straightforward economics. An independent cost review already showed offshore wind was not competitive, so exiting a stalled lease and redeploying the capital into nuclear, gas, and grid lets the utility meet rising demand more cheaply and reliably for Carolinas customers ^[2][9]. For Duke, the deal cuts exposure to an expensive, uncertain project, recovers and redeploys lease capital, and aligns with both a friendlier federal posture and a weakened state carbon mandate — freeing $129 million for projects it prefers and tilting its resource mix toward solar, gas, and nuclear, with no new wind planned until at least 2040 ^[5][9].

How the Critics See It

Clean-energy advocates and environmental groups see the same transaction very differently. They argue that cancelling permitted, zero-carbon capacity during an electricity-demand boom raises long-run costs and risks, and that a federal program effectively paying developers to quit clean projects wastes public lease money and props up fossil generation ^[5][10][11]. New gas, they warn, locks in higher costs and emissions and contradicts state climate law. Their stake is the survival of an industry: preserving offshore wind's momentum and supply chain, and blocking a precedent of buyouts that could unwind clean-energy leases nationwide ^[10][11]. Some groups and officials are now pressing for investigations into the deals and warning of investor alarm ^[10].

Along the coast, the picture is mixed. Some Brunswick County residents and tourism interests welcomed an end to a project they feared would mar ocean views or disrupt fisheries, while others had counted on construction jobs, tax revenue, and long-term clean power ^[1][3][5]. Ratepayers across the Carolinas ultimately bear the cost and reliability consequences of whatever gets built instead ^[5][9].

The sharpest factual dispute is the nature of that $129 million. Supporters describe it as Duke's own capital being redirected to better in-state projects; critics contend the broader buyout program refunds developers' lease payments, in effect paying them to abandon permitted clean-energy sites ^[4][10]. Notably, even a free-market energy group has described the program as refunding companies for their leases — a detail that lends weight to the critics' characterization, even as both camps reach for vocabulary built to obscure it.

How the Coverage Split

The spectrum of headlines tracks the divide almost word for word. The Interior Department's own release billed the deal as an "energy agreement to strengthen American energy security and lower costs," never using the word "cancel" ^[3]. Right-leaning outlets such as the Carolina Journal led with "reinvest," treating the money as Duke's to redeploy ^[2]. Center business coverage from Bloomberg framed it as Trump pulling "the plug" on the project "as cancellations mount" ^[7].

Left-leaning and clean-energy outlets pushed hardest the other way: Fortune asked why "Americans are paying $2 billion to cancel wind projects amid an energy crisis" ^[8], The Conversation called the program a "buyoff" and "a bad deal for American taxpayers" ^[11], and the Natural Resources Defense Council emphasized investigations and investor alarm ^[10]. Direct non-Western coverage of this specific North Carolina deal was thin; overseas interest has centered on the broader anti-offshore-wind campaign rather than the Duke lease itself. Same transaction, four different headlines — each side's language engineered around the one detail it would rather the reader not weigh.