In the constellation of renewable energy technologies the US has tried to deploy to fight climate change, offshore wind has had perhaps the most rocky road in recent years. In 2023, high interest rates and the global supply chain shocks brought a slew of developments across the country to an end. Even without these macroeconomic obstacles, offshore wind is a huge business. It is hard to overstate the sheer scale of the effort that is building an offshore wind farm. The largest turbines are the length of football fields and require specially built ships to transport them.
If offshore wind can take off anywhere, it’s New England, whose waters offer the highest wind capacity factor (the amount of energy a turbine can produce over time) in the continental US. In October 2023, three states — Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts — signed a first-of-its-kind multi-state procurement agreement to jointly share the costs and benefits of adding new offshore wind generation. The vision behind the plan was to reduce the cost per megawatt of the electricity generated. So far, the results of this agreement have been uneven: two of the states have chosen developers for new projects, but Connecticut didn’t have.
But the election of Donald Trump could halt the region’s momentum before it had a real chance to take off. Trump has made a point of demonizing the technology (“I hate wind,” he said). reported to bluntly tell oil and gas executives at a fundraiser) and repeatedly made false claims about its impact on wildlife. At a campaign rally in May, Trump promised to ensure that offshore wind projects stall “on day one” of his second term. It could have been a mere campaign stunt, but of the clean energy technologies that the Inflation Reduction Act poured money into, offshore wind is perhaps the most vulnerable to an unfriendly president.
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In addition to the political calculations, the question of whether this coalition of states can build and deploy the offshore wind projects amounts to a test of American industrial capacity. To bolster the case to state governments for doubling, there is growing support in the region from a somewhat unlikely corner: New England’s industrial unions, a group of which has published a report last week, in partnership with the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, outlined an ambitious vision to provide the region with not just offshore wind turbines, but a locally based industrial manufacturing base to support them.
“This whole industry that we’re trying to launch has thousands and thousands of jobs, whether you’re talking about port construction or port renovations to make sure that offshore wind can be developed on a larger scale, whether you’re talking about component manufacturing , whether you’re talking about vessel manufacturing — all of these things are going to be critically important,” said Patrick Crowley, the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO. “We are not just talking about individual energy projects. We are talking about the development of an entire energy industry and everything that goes into it.”
At a launch event Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told the report Tuesday that the unions’ proposal “supports the region’s continued progress in building a robust, worker-centered offshore wind industry. This is an incredible opportunity to lower costs and create good jobs for working people in our region while achieving energy independence, cleaner air and a climate-resilient future.”
There are only three operational wind farms in the country. According to Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm in Washington, those power plants generate only about 200 megawatts of electricity – a fraction of the 50 gigawatts (50,000 megawatts) that states have committed to building, if their renewables energy targets are added together. The federal government approved leases for wind projects that would generate 15 gigawatts of energy, and the onus is now on states to build the turbines — and to require their utilities to buy electricity from them.
The unions’ report calls for the construction of 9 gigawatts of offshore wind energy in the waters off Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts by 2030 – up to 30 gigawatts by 2040, and 60 gigawatts by 2050.
To achieve these goals, the report suggests that states “a climate and jobs strategy, built around new investment, active government facilitation of industry growth, and reliance on a skilled unionized workforce.” It argues the success of offshore wind will depend on a combination of investment in the region’s ports, regionally based component manufacturing, locally built installation vessels, coordinated transmission planning between the states involved and strong labor standards.
To maximize the benefits of offshore wind, the three states will need to coordinate their efforts on a range of tasks, from building transmission lines (which often require difficult interstate negotiations) to collective procurement—and this is one area where, Crowley argued, unions are uniquely positioned to help, leveraging the power of their mass membership across state lines and political influence in Democratic state governments.
“There is no other organization other than the labor movement that has a presence in all these states in such a way that if my counterpart in New York, Vinny Alvarez, calls and says, ‘Patrick, there’s a hearing at the Rhode Island Coastal Resource Management Council about a transmission line we’re doing. Can you get some people to testify?’ — ‘Absolutely.’ And we’re there within hours,” Crowley said.
As an example of this leadership in action, Crowley cited the tri-state procurement agreement, which he described as “a paradigm shift in thinking that I don’t think would be possible except for the labor movement driving this agenda.” He viewed the agreement as a departure from the standard practice by which states attract investment and industry: “All these states are competing with each other when it comes to the economic market,” Crowley said.
“We’re dealing with something here in Rhode Island,” he continued. “One of our major employers, Hasbro Toys, is being courted by Massachusetts to move from Providence to Cambridge to move their headquarters there; we could lose a thousand jobs and Massachusetts would gain them. We’re not going to stop that kind of competition. But when we can eliminate that from the beginning, at the beginning of this industry — oh my God. It’s a total economic paradigm shift that I don’t think people have fully digested yet.”
But getting the unions’ vision across the finish line, especially against the headwinds of an unfriendly federal government, will be no easy feat – and depends heavily on private investment. This is also somewhere Crowley believes unions can play a role. “The labor movement has access to a large amount of investable capital through our pension funds,” he said. “And maybe we need to be creative about how we can use the funds that are in our pension systems, both private and public sector, to be a funding mechanism for the development of this industry.”
Jeff Plaisted, an electrician in Massachusetts, worked on the crew that laid six miles of cable from the Vineyard Wind wind farm on the coast of Martha’s Vineyard to a power substation on Cape Cod, which runs under the streets of the town of Hyannis.
“As the Vineyard Wind project broke ground, and that project really got off the ground,” Plaisted said, “we had full employment in Local 223” — the southeastern Massachusetts branch of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, of which Plaisted is now the business agent and organizer of membership development.
The project brought an unusual amount of work to the region. “We had travelers from other jurisdictions come and sign our book to work in our jurisdiction because we needed the outside manpower we had to offer just to fill the job calls. That substation in Hyannis had 70 to 80 electricians on board, and we very rarely see jobs in our jurisdiction that require that kind of manpower,” Plaisted said.
When Plaisted began working on the Vineyard Wind project, “What surprised me personally is the size, the size of the turbines themselves,” he said. The work itself was far from the normal work of a union electrician. “You don’t just strip wires. The splicing operations, everything related to it is highly skilled and very technical. The guys that are abroad, they take a boat to work, five plus hours abroad,” Plaisted said.
He is part of a growing number of union leaders who have spent the Biden years making the case that organized labor will have to play a leading role in the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels — not just in offshore wind, but across the vast landscape. from industrial work, from electric vehicles to transmission development, which the transition will require.
Plaisted said that unions take into account the fact that “climate change is not a theory. It’s a real thing, it’s not a belief system, it’s an issue we’re going to have to deal with. If the goal is to get off fossil fuels, everything has to be brought to the table – solar, wind, battery. And union labor is the way to make those things happen,” Plaisted said.
Their efforts have been boosted in some ways by Biden’s attachment of labor-friendly requirements to many of the clean energy grants, as well as an unusually friendly National Labor Relations Board. But unions now face a set of strategic decisions about how to engage with a Republican administration that is expected to be far less friendly to organized labor. “We’re at a crossroads,” said Keith Brothers, business manager for the Connecticut Labor District Council.
Under a new Trump administration, unions’ efforts may become more local. “We will fight in Congress and in the halls of agencies,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental organizations, said in an interview before the election. “But I would expect our members and the members of our partners to be more in the streets, in the fullest sense of that term, and on the shop floor, and working a lot more in state capitals, while we don’t take our eyes off everyone not collect the dangerous actions that a Trump administration would follow.”
