California’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Friday calling the federal government’s handling of an offshore wind lease an “extortion racket,” which is a fun phrase to see land in an actual legal complaint instead of just floating around as vibes.

Here’s the setup: a joint venture of the Canada Pension Plan and Ocean Winds won a federal auction for a Morro Bay lease site, 2 GW of potential capacity, for $150.3 million. Real bid, real process, real money changing hands. Then in April, the administration offered them $120 million to walk away. Less than they paid. And the word everyone’s using for this is “buyback,” which is doing something strange, because you buy back a thing you used to own. The federal government never owned this lease. It sold it.

What you’d actually call this, if the word “extortion” weren’t already sitting right there, is: leave voluntarily for a loss, or we find other ways to make sure you get nothing at all. California’s lawsuit is essentially asking a court to notice that the first option was never really optional. It’s the third such deal I’ve seen this year, after TotalEnergies in March. Not a one-off. A method: you can’t cancel these leases by fiat, so you buy the appearance of a handshake instead.

Meanwhile, over at PJM, a company trying to interconnect a nuclear-gas-fuel cell hybrid for a Meta data center just got dropped from the queue because the rules have no category for what it’s building. Two different ways a system tells you no: one by force, one by simply not having a box to check.

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