How Trump’s War on Offshore Wind Upended a “Limitless” Future for Thousands of New England Workers
The administration also has frozen future development on all offshore wind farms, including a cluster of projects that haven’t been built but proposed to power up to 1.7 million New England homes.
Key points
- Amid the Trump administration’s multifront war against offshore wind, the cost on the ground in New England, the launchpad of the country’s offshore wind industry, can be seen in empty warehouses, silent marine terminals and ledgers recording hundreds of millions of dollars of state investment that may not be recouped.
- Department of the Interior asked a court for permission to reconsider a key permit for one of those five projects, Revolution Wind, which is already up and running and can power more than 350,000 New England homes at maximum capacity.
- When a reporter pointed out that the bill includes wind energy, Trump said he would not approve “wind turbines ’cause wind turbines are a major loser.” The upheaval has had ripple effects.
Many offshore wind projects faced a precarious future before President Donald Trump retook office.
He praised an Italian company’s plans to build a new factory there, set to create 250 jobs and supply American-made undersea power cables to what was then a line of offshore wind projects waiting to be built along the coast.
Additional details
- A 20-minute drive east, in New Bedford, hundreds of workers who helped assemble wind turbine parts from Canada and Europe over the last three years have given way to seagulls and geese.
- Prysmian Caleb Kenna for ProPublica An architectural rendering of plans for an offshore wind cable factory on Brayton Point, compared with a 2026 photograph of the same area.
- In nearby Providence, Rhode Island, a newly built factory that manufactured offshore wind turbine foundation platforms has emptied out.
- The birds shuffle along the now-empty pier the state of Massachusetts spent $140 million to build for offshore wind development.
- The Vineyard Wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts in May Eleonora Bianchi/The New Bedford Light On a hot July day in 2022, then-President Joe Biden gave a speech from the ruins of a coal-fired power plant on the southern coast of Massachusetts.
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