Here are the facts; the judgment is yours.

by Compass Vermont

Vermont buys about a quarter of its electricity from Hydro-Québec through 2038, and not one watt from the New York offshore wind lease its Attorney General sued this week to restore.

On June 2, Attorney General Charity Clark joined the attorneys general of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Case No. 1:26-cv-01910), asking a federal judge to undo the cancellation of offshore wind lease OCS-A 0538 in the New York Bight. The Attorney General’s Office described it as the 51st case Clark has brought against the Trump administration since January 2025.

The deal being challenged

The lease at issue covers more than 84,000 acres between Long Island and the New Jersey coast. A subsidiary of the French energy company TotalEnergies, Attentive Energy LLC, paid $795 million for it in 2022 — part of an auction the complaint describes as the highest-grossing competitive offshore energy lease sale in U.S. history, drawing about $4.37 billion in winning bids.

In March 2026, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced a settlement: TotalEnergies would relinquish the New York lease and a separate North Carolina lease, the federal government would reimburse the company $928 million across both, and TotalEnergies would invest an equal amount in oil, gas and liquefied natural gas projects while pledging never to develop offshore wind in the United States again. Interior framed the arrangement as redirecting capital away from what Secretary Doug Burgum has called a “scam” toward “affordable, reliable” energy. The company’s chief executive, Patrick Pouyanné, told Axios the deal originated with TotalEnergies: “It came from us — we took the initiative.”

The states’ lawsuit advances five claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing the cancellation was arbitrary and capricious, skipped environmental review required by NEPA, violated the procedures the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act requires for canceling a lease, and improperly tapped the U.S. Treasury’s Judgment Fund — money reserved for settling actual litigation — when, the complaint contends, no litigation was imminent and both sides wanted the same outcome.

What the lease was for

The turbines were never going to serve Vermont, and the complaint says so plainly. The lease area sits in the New York Bight, and the wind built there was expected to interconnect directly into New York’s Load Zone J — the load zone for New York City. BOEM built a NYISO Zone J reference price into the lease’s fee formula, the complaint notes, signaling the expectation that the electricity would be sold into the city, which it describes as in significant need of additional supply. The two planned projects, Attentive Energy One and Attentive Energy Two, were slated to power roughly 700,000 New York homes and 650,000 New Jersey homes respectively.

New York and New Jersey carry the weight of the complaint. New York’s section runs more than two dozen paragraphs and quantifies its stake down to a projected $25.6 billion in economic benefits and $10 billion in ratepayer savings over the project’s life. New Jersey’s section ties the loss to congestion costs on the PJM grid.

Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island appear together as “the New England States.” Within that section, Massachusetts is credited with settling roughly 1.74 million renewable energy credits from New York generators in 2023, most of them from wind; Rhode Island with drawing 25.2 percent of its settled credits from New York in 2024. Maine and Connecticut get their renewable-portfolio statutes. The climate-harm paragraphs invoke coastline — Massachusetts sea-level rise, Maine’s 3,500 miles of tidal coast, Rhode Island’s Newport tide gauge.

Vermont is named in the caption and in the collective label. It is the only one of the seven plaintiffs with no individualized injury allegation in the complaint.

The data: where Vermont’s power actually comes from

Vermont’s single largest source of electricity is Hydro-Québec, under a contract covering about 25 percent of the state’s annual supply through 2038, according to the Department of Public Service. The power flows in through the Highgate converter in the state’s northwest corner. Green Mountain Power, which serves roughly 40 percent of the state, draws 23 percent of what it distributes from Hydro-Québec and reports being 100 percent carbon-free and 82 percent renewable. Vermont Electric Cooperative, serving the north, gets more than 40 percent of its electricity from the Canadian supplier.

What Vermont generates in-state was, in 2025, about 53.5 percent hydroelectric, 18.9 percent biomass, 17 percent wind and 10.5 percent solar, with effectively no natural gas, according to federal Energy Information Administration data. There is no offshore wind anywhere in the mix. And Vermont generates only a fraction of what it uses — the state consumes roughly three times more electricity than it produces, importing the balance from Canada and, to a far smaller degree, New York.

New York’s place in that picture is small. The regional grid operator, ISO-New England, imports about 17 percent of its annual energy needs from Québec, New York and New Brunswick combined, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. New York is one slice of that figure, shared across six states. The complaint’s own seasonal number is that New England drew 3,119 gigawatt-hours from New York between January and April 2026 — about 7 percent of regional load in a winter-heavy window. Vermont is roughly 4.5 percent of that regional load. Set against a 25 percent Hydro-Québec contract, New York is a rounding error in Vermont’s supply.

ANALYSIS: A policy choice, and what it does and doesn’t do for Vermont

Strip the case to its effect on Vermont and a simple fact remains: the outcome will not change Vermont’s electricity supply in either direction. The lease was built to serve New York City — its power was always New York’s to use — so whether a judge restores it or lets the cancellation stand, Vermont’s grid looks the same the day after. Vermont draws no electricity from the lease, holds no contract tied to it, and counts none of its wind toward Vermont’s renewable compliance. The two ways the complaint connects the loss to New England — less surplus New York power to export north in winter, and a tighter regional market for renewable energy credits — are real market effects, but they are diffuse, shared across six states, and small against the quarter of Vermont’s supply that comes from Hydro-Québec. On the narrow question of direct impact, this lawsuit barely registers for Vermont.

That does not make Vermont’s name on it improper, and it is worth being clear why. In a multistate challenge like this one, a single plaintiff with clear standing carries the case — and New York, whose city the lease was meant to serve, plainly has it. Joining is a policy decision by the Attorney General’s office: a standing approach of entering multistate coalitions against federal actions, the 51st such case since January 2025 by the office’s own count. It is a deliberate posture, not a reaction to any direct threat to Vermont, and reasonable Vermonters can read it more than one way — as principled solidarity that adds legal weight to fights the state believes in, or as a commitment of Vermont’s resources to disputes in which the state has little of its own at stake. The commitment here is modest: New York filed with a full environmental-protection bureau, while Vermont’s footprint on the complaint is a single assistant attorney general, Hannah Yindra, listed as counsel. Modest is not nothing, and the choice to join — in this case, and as a pattern — is a fair thing for Vermonters to weigh.

If the direct supply stake is thin, the case for joining rests on two other grounds, and both are stronger than the supply argument. The first is precedent. The complaint warns that the TotalEnergies settlement is a blueprint — ten days after it closed, Interior cut near-identical deals with Bluepoint Wind in the same New York Bight and Golden State Wind off California, and the filing projects that continued copycat deals could cut New York Bight wind supply by as much as 80 percent. The same mechanism threatens projects that do serve New England: Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, both of which were hit by federal suspension orders in late 2025 and litigated back into operation. Stopping the playbook before it reaches New England-serving wind is a coherent regional stake.

The second is process, and it has nothing to do with geography. The complaint’s argument that this was a “sham settlement” is its strongest: there was no imminent lawsuit to settle, both sides wanted the deal, the company initiated it, and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act already specifies a compensation formula for lease cancellations — one that would have paid less than the full $795 million purchase price the government instead drew from the Judgment Fund. Whether federal money was lawfully spent is a question any state attorney general can join regardless of whether a single electron reaches home.

There is also a Vermont-government acknowledgment worth putting beside the lawsuit. In its 2026 Annual Energy Report, published January 15, the Department of Public Service recommended reviewing the Renewable Energy Standard’s regional-tier requirements “in light of federal policy changes reducing the amount of offshore wind and other resources expected to be available.” Vermont’s own energy regulators, in other words, have connected the federal rollback to Vermont’s renewable compliance — but their proposed response is to reconsider the requirement, not to count on offshore wind arriving. It is a clear-eyed read of Vermont’s exposure: the rollback touches Vermont not as lost power, but as one more pressure on a regional renewable standard the state is already struggling to source.

The facts sit plainly enough to leave the conclusion open. This lawsuit will not add or subtract a watt from Vermont’s grid; the power was New York’s all along. Joining it was a policy choice — lightly resourced but real — of a kind the Attorney General’s office makes often. Whether that is a wise use of Vermont’s hand in the federal courts, in this case and across the other fifty, is a question Vermonters are well positioned to answer for themselves.

A note on sourcing

This story relies on primary documents: the complaint as filed (Case No. 1:26-cv-01910, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, June 2, 2026); the U.S. Department of the Interior’s March 23, 2026 settlement announcement; the Vermont Attorney General’s June 2, 2026 press release; the Vermont Department of Public Service’s 2026 Annual Energy Report (January 15, 2026); U.S. Energy Information Administration generation data; and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission figures on ISO-New England imports. Utility-level figures are from Green Mountain Power, its parent company Énergir, and Vermont Electric Cooperative, as reported through the Department of Public Service. Quotation of Interior, the company’s chief executive and federal officials reflects statements reproduced in the public complaint and agency announcements.