This article was produced in collaboration with ProPublica’s Sustainability Desk, a project of the Local Reporting Network. The Connecticut Mirror, The New Bedford Light and Ocean State Media worked together to understand how the Trump administration’s war on offshore wind has hurt workers and communities across New England.
From The New Bedford Light: Fishermen’s offshore wind work drying up
From Ocean State Media: Offshore wind saved a struggling New Bedford union. Now its future is uncertain
And in ProPublica: Trump’s war on offshore wind has hurt thousands of workers
On a tour a few years ago through the North Sea coast of the United Kingdom, New London Mayor Michael Passero caught a glimpse of what a resurgence of manufacturing might look like back home in Connecticut.
At a factory in Hartlepool, he watched workers assemble underwater cables that deliver power from the country’s numerous offshore wind farms to shore. To the south, he visited a workforce development center run by the shipping giant Maersk, where workers received specialized training to work at sea on gigantic turbines.
There was even a lab developing submersible robots capable of completing jobs in rough seas that are too dangerous for humans, Passero recalled.
In the port of Blythe — which, like New London, had seen its maritime trades wither due to decades of deindustrialization — the harbor had been repurposed as a staging area for the UK’s surging offshore wind industry, one of the world’s largest.
“I think the future just looked limitless,” Passero said. “You could almost look to Europe and really see the future here, see everything that can be done. And we have some of the best wind in the world right off the Northeast here, so the industry really looked good there for a while.
“Until Donald Trump got reelected,” he said.
Before last year’s efforts by the Trump administration to grind America’s offshore wind industry to a halt, New London was poised to become a regional hub for developers looking to take advantage of the Atlantic’s abundant winds.
The state of Connecticut, through the use of public borrowing, invested more than $211 million to expand a state-owned pier in the city to handle the loading and offloading of parts onto specialized installation vessels. The Danish energy developer Ørsted, partnering with local utility company Eversource, signed on to launch its first three U.S. offshore wind projects from New London, kicking in another $100 million toward the redevelopment of the State Pier.
In addition to employing thousands of workers during construction, the wind projects were billed as a way to wean the region off its historic dependence on oil and natural gas to meet its growing energy needs.
Revolution Wind, the second of the three Ørsted projects launched from New London, is contracted to sell 704 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 350,000 homes — to customers in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The other two projects, South Fork and Sunrise Wind, are connected to New York through underwater cables.
As those connections get up and running, much of the work will dry up. If the Trump administration succeeds in its ongoing efforts to end future offshore wind development in the United States — which by recent accounts is likely — it will eliminate thousands of current and future jobs on America’s waterfronts from Massachusetts to Virginia. Many of these jobs are located in struggling seaports like New Bedford, Mass., and New London, Conn., where states invested hundreds of millions of dollars in port infrastructure and workforce training to court giant offshore wind companies.
The resulting uncertainty has led international wind developers to redirect investment towards other countries or even sell back their leases. Workers who have undergone specialized training or pinned their futures on the promise of steady offshore wind construction could find themselves unable to continue working in the industry. Meanwhile, the states that invested heavily in offshore wind infrastructure are at risk of seeing their purpose-built piers sitting empty, as is the case in New Bedford.
Today, the State Pier in New London remains a bustling hive of activity. Turbine blades that stretch the length of a football field are stacked on the heavy-lift platform, ready to be transported out to sea on the specialized installation vessel Wind Scylla — named for one of the mythic sea monsters from Homer’s “Odyssey.”
That initial run of offshore wind projects is only scheduled to last through 2027. Officials are searching for a future tenant that can take over Ørsted’s position at the pier, but no contracts have been announced.
Just a few years ago, however, the investment in wind was touted by local leaders as a long-term vision for New London’s waterfront.
“This is going to be a major facility for decades and decades to come,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont triumphantly declared during a visit to the then-active construction site in 2022.
A new purpose for the port
New London is an old port city of irregular streets and 19th-Century buildings squeezed into a 10-square-mile strip of land where the Thames River meets Long Island Sound. Like New Bedford, the city was once home to a large whaling fleet but struggled to compete with larger trading ports like New York and Boston after that industry declined.
Across the river, in Groton, the waterfront is dominated by the Navy’s primary East Coast submarine base and General Dynamics Electric Boat’s sprawling shipyard.
But prior to the launch of the offshore wind industry, New London’s maritime trade had mostly dwindled to a few ferries shuttling passengers to and from Long Island alongside the underutilized State Pier, which had been used to import wood pulp, road salt and other products.
All that seemed destined to change by the time Passero joined a delegation of state and local officials on a tour of the U.K.’s offshore wind industry in 2024.
Between community host agreements, docking fees and crews coming ashore to spend money in the bars and restaurants along Bank Street, Passero said he estimated the economic benefit would amount to around $1 million a year for the city — a modest sum that would nonetheless provide a boost to Passero’s efforts to reinvigorate the city’s struggling downtown.
“You’re not going to fit much in New London, but we got the pier,” Passero said.
Passero was thinking beyond the city’s borders, too. North of New London, the Thames River once powered textile mills that served as one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution.
“We’d get our share of what was appropriate to put in New London, but then the whole area — think of this whole river, all the empty factories along the river — I had visions of these factories being repurposed, you know to be able to, provide some of the materials and equipment that’s needed for this industry,” he said.
Before entering politics, Passero worked as a union laborer on several area projects, including the redevelopment of an old railroad bridge and erecting a new laboratory building at Pfizer’s research campus across the harbor in Groton.
“It was good money,” he said. “My BA wasn’t going to get me anything.”
Passero’s son, Thomas Passero, followed his father into the building trades and wound up working on both the redevelopment of the State Pier and the subsequent staging of offshore wind projects through Laborers Local 547.
With the exception of a short diversion to work on an unrelated highway project, the younger Passero said the activity at the State Pier has provided him with a steady stream of income for more than five years, a rarity in the industry. Even when the Trump administration ordered its halt to the work taking place miles offshore, he said workers at the pier never experienced even a single-day layoff.
“As a New London man, I’ve never seen it so busy,” the younger Passero said. “And it’s not just the pier, you go down to Ocean Beach and see the cargo ships — cargo ships! It’s pretty cool.”
30 gigawatts by 2030
By all accounts, the revitalization Mayor Passero imagined on that trip to the U.K. had hit a few bumps before Trump took office the following January.
Ørsted, the developer behind the three New London-based projects, pulled out of two similar projects off the coast of New Jersey in 2023, citing rising interest rates and supply chain issues that plagued much of the industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elsewhere cost overruns, project delays and technical challenges threatened to slow the progress toward reaching President Joe Biden’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.
Still, work was moving forward on projects off the coast of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Virginia.
The first of those projects, Ørsted’s South Fork Wind, began sending power to the electric grid in 2023. It was followed over the last year by Revolution Wind, Dominion’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and Avangrid’s Vineyard Wind. The final two projects under construction, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind and Equinor’s Empire Wind, are scheduled to reach commercial operation sometime next year.
Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to halt each of those projects have scuttled the long-term outlook for U.S. offshore wind. The completed projects are slated to supply a total of 6 gigawatts to the grid by the end of next year, far from the 30-gigawatt goal established by Trump’s predecessor.
Instead of planning new projects in American waters once its current work in New London is complete, Ørsted announced last year that it would instead shift its focus to “core markets” in Europe and Asia. During an earnings call with the investors in February, Ørsted chief executive Rasmus Errboe delivered a blunt assessment of his company’s future in the U.S.
“We have no expectations whatsoever to increase our exposure to offshore wind in the U.S.,” he said.
Standing on the sidelines
Thomas Passero, the mayor’s son who works at the pier, said he wasn’t too anxious about the future of offshore wind construction. “Being in the trade unions… it’s kind of beaten into us that we’re gonna just build ourselves out of a job and go to another one anyway,” Passero said. “So how permanent is anything, you know?”
Still, he said it was hard to find a job site like the one he had — with consistent hours, years of work, and all only a 10 minute drive from his home and two young children.
“I hope it stays busy forever. I hope they keep building windmills or something that we can participate in here.”
Speaking at Yale University in May, Eversource’s president of transmission Bill Quinlan said the industry had been severely weakened by macroeconomic forces and “nonconstructive federal policy.” (Eversource exited the offshore wind industry in 2024, selling its stake in two projects for $745 million.)
While the current slate of projects is likely to be completed, he said, it would could some time before any new projects are announced.
“I would set that aside for the time being, I don’t see [wind] making a significant comeback in the near term in this country,” Quinlan said.
“I think developers — the international developers who have the expertise — are probably going to stand on the sidelines for a period of time here in the U.S.”