The largest benefactor of the Interior Department’s most recent illegal wind buyout is an Australian-American billionaire whose private equity firm will receive $900 million in exchange for a stake in a methane gas terminal in Louisiana. The near-billion-dollar buyout comes after the same billionaire gave a $1 million bribe to the originator of the deal.

At issue is the recent deal by the Department of the Interior with RWE, a German energy company that had been set to build several wind farms off the US coast.

Interior illegally gave $1.22 billion to RWE to get them to stop building these projects, and RWE will instead put $900 million of that money into purchasing a stake in a methane gas terminal in Louisiana and $300 million into building dirty methane gas turbines for data centers, which are making electricity both more expensive and dirtier.

It’s part of a pattern of wasteful spending by the Interior Department, which has so far spent around $4 billion of taxpayer money on canceling wind projects in order to starve America of energy and raise electricity prices.

This money has been spent illegally – not only is it coming out of a government fund that can’t be used for this purpose, but the government cannot haphazardly cancel energy projects on the outer continental shelf.

But it turns out the RWE deal is even more nefarious than we previously thought, as it has now been reported that the $900 million will go to buying out a portion of the stake owned by Stonepeak, a private equity fund owned by Australian-American billionaire Michael Dorrell.

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