BRENTWOOD, N.Y. — A former Navy sailor and union laborer from Local 1298 on Long Island, William “Billy” Bishop jumped at the chance to work on the water again when he learned two years ago about job opportunities on offshore wind construction projects.
After earning a safety certification from the National Offshore Wind Training Center — a collaboration between Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, the Long Island Federation of Labor and multinational wind farm developer Orsted — Bishop worked on a wind farm near Rhode Island. Now he’s doing structural inspections and maintenance on Sunrise Wind, which is under construction off the coast of Long Island.
But the Trump administration’s efforts to crush offshore wind projects, part of its broader assault on clean energy, have created deep uncertainty for training programs like NOWTC and workers like Bishop.
“I would definitely do this forever, and I’ve looked into it since getting the job. But, I see contracts are falling through nonstop now in America,” said Bishop. “This might be the last one for a while.”
In 2021, the Biden administration set a target to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade, starting from almost zero, which jump-started a massive effort to train people for jobs in the industry. That rapid ramp-up would have required an estimated 77,000 workers — to build the wind farms, connect the turbines to the grid, operate and maintain the facilities, manufacture the rugged steel components and more.
To that end, several states and energy developers collaborated with universities, unions and community workforce groups on a variety of offshore wind education and training initiatives, including safety certifications for skilled laborers, apprenticeships for turbine technicians and graduate programs in offshore wind planning and policy.
But since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, an offshore wind industry that seemed primed to explode has been pummeled by legal, administrative and economic challenges. While the Trump administration has also taken aim at solar and onshore wind, it has the most leverage over projects offshore, where the federal government is the landlord. The onshore wind industry in the United States already dwarfed its offshore cousin and continues to grow, for now, despite federal pushback. But the near-term outlook for offshore wind is bleak, and there could be more lasting consequences if wind developers shy away from investing in a market they perceive as risky.
When it comes to energy policy, “the pendulum always swings from one president to another,” said Timothy Fox, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, an industry research firm based in Washington, D.C. “But now the swings are so dramatic that the pendulum’s going to fall off the clock.”
For now, offshore wind training programs are staying afloat by downsizing, focusing on skills that are also useful for careers outside of offshore wind or sending graduates to work on the handful of offshore projects already under construction when Trump took office. The leaders of these training initiatives insist that an energy-hungry nation still needs offshore power and that the wind boom isn’t dead, just delayed.
“We’re not making any decisions right now,” said Roger Clayman, a NOWTC director and the retired executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor. “Offshore wind will be back.”
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The domestic offshore wind industry is still in its infancy; the first commercial-scale wind farm, off the Long Island coast, only started delivering power in December 2023. Back then, the industry seemed poised for exponential growth spurred by billions in federal grants, tax credits, loans and other spending under Biden. Several much larger wind farms were already under construction and dozens more were in the permitting pipeline.
A March 2024 report by the Department of Energy estimated that the nation would face a massive deficit of qualified wind workers by 2030. “We anticipated not only expanding but that there would be multiple centers,” said Matthew Aracich, another NOWTC director and the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York.
Instead, the wind rush came to a screeching halt on Jan. 20, 2025. One of Trump’s first actions of his second term was to sign the “wind order,” pausing all new leases and permit approvals for both onshore and offshore projects. Later that year, the government issued emergency “stop work” orders on the five offshore wind projects under construction, arguing that they raised national security concerns.
Both the stop work orders and the wind order were eventually overturned in federal courts. But the Trump administration’s war on offshore wind continued on other fronts.
The government rolled back renewable energy tax credits, which it labeled “market distorting subsidies for unreliable, foreign controlled energy sources,” and rescinded hundreds of millions in grants earmarked for offshore wind and related projects. Meanwhile, the administration has tried to revoke existing permits for offshore wind and slow-walk permitting reviews for new wind projects. Earlier this year, the administration started paying wind energy developers to abandon their offshore leases.
The combined effects have dimmed offshore wind’s near-term prospects. There are about 6 gigawatts of offshore wind online or under construction off the U.S. coast — less than a third of what the Biden administration had approved for construction. And no new offshore wind farms have broken ground since he left office. That could leave the programs preparing skilled laborers for offshore construction jobs in the lurch when all existing wind projects are complete.
“I think we’re going to be busy into 2027. How deep into 2027, we don’t know,” said Clayman. That’s when Orsted’s Sunrise Wind off the coast of Long Island is scheduled for completion. (Orsted declined to be interviewed for this story, as did Equinor, another major wind-farm developer in U.S. waters that invested in workforce development.)
Similar questions are facing other unions that upskilled their members for offshore wind jobs, including the Pile Drivers Local Union 56 in Boston, whose workers needed extra training to handle the massive offshore piles that can weigh about 1,800 tons. The heavy-lift training was supported by the international offshore energy company Deme, and grants from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state economic development agency. These workers helped build Vineyard Wind 1, completed this March off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island, which was just finished.
“Right now, our projects are on the tail end,” said John Dunderdale, business manager for the pile drivers’ union. He said the trained workers assisted with projects off the coast of New York, and the union had been approached about sending workers to help build overseas wind farms.
With or without new offshore wind projects, there’s plenty of work for pile drivers and other skilled labor on normal building and infrastructure projects. But Dunderdale mourns the missed opportunities, notably the New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind projects, both of which were on the cusp of starting construction when Trump took office but are now on indefinite hold.
“We should have been on to the next one,” he said. “The jobs were there. The training was there. The money, you know, everything was there.”
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Other training programs are trying to adapt to the new realities of offshore wind, too. A half-hour drive from the NOWTC, on the campus of Stony Brook University, about a dozen undergraduates recently gathered in a lab for a lesson on wiring high-voltage direct current, or HVDC. Huddled around docking stations the size of vending machines, they attempted different wiring setups with simulated HVDC, which, because it transmits electricity efficiently over long distances, is often used for energy sources like wind and solar that are far from population centers.
The class was one of several started in 2024 on State University of New York campuses as part of an effort called the Offshore Wind Training Institute, funded with $20 million from the state and the SUNY system. The class was designed to prepare people specifically for the emerging offshore wind industry. But more recently, it has shifted to focus on a wider range of HVDC applications, such as connecting solar farms to battery storage and integrating regional grids.
“Luckily, we have a skill and a discipline that we’re teaching these students that does not entirely rely on offshore wind,” said Derek O’Connor, senior workforce development manager in Stony Brook’s Office for Research and Innovation.
A similar pivot occurred within “A Taste of the Trades,” a paid summer training program for local high schoolers created two years ago by Stony Brook, Suffolk County Community College, Brookhaven National Laboratory and a company working on the Sunrise Wind project. The program offers hands-on learning for a wide range of jobs in the energy sector, including welding and microgrid development. The first summer, networking events and visits to job sites were designed to introduce students to opportunities in offshore wind, but more recently, students have been exposed to a wider range of electric grid operations and infrastructure jobs.
The more you look at the variety of skills needed for work in offshore wind, the more you see overlaps with what’s needed in the nation’s energy sector writ large, said O’Connor. “We’ve been flexible and agile in responding to some of the changes, being less focused on the power generation source and more about grid stability and reliability.”
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Indeed, despite the political attacks on offshore wind and the diminishing opportunities, the clean energy sector overall faces a big and growing shortage of workers. Wind turbine technicians and solar installers, for example, are among the fastest growing occupations in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The industry continues to grow, even with the uncertainty that we’re experiencing,” said Abby Huston, vice president of programs for the Clean Power Institute, the nonprofit workforce development arm of the American Clean Power Association, a national advocacy and trade organization. “What we’ve found is there’s a lot more adaptation in terms of how to build workforce programs rather than closing them down, because there’s still such a huge need.”
Other examples: Her group is partnering with schools and community colleges to build awareness of clean energy and its career opportunities broadly; the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has shifted some of its funding focus from offshore wind to a new, broader portfolio in “ocean tech,” such as improving coastal resilience and monitoring the health of marine ecosystems by analyzing traces of DNA in the water; and a Maryland state job training program created in 2022 to bolster the offshore wind industry has placed thousands of people in fields requiring similar skills such as shipbuilding and aerospace.
Meanwhile, energy industry experts say there are plenty of reasons to believe that offshore wind could eventually make a comeback; the surging demand and cost of energy is putting more pressure on policymakers to tap every available source.
Back at the NOWTC, workers are still signing up for training, but they are increasingly people renewing their certifications, which last two years, rather than first-timers, according to Clayman.
This summer, one of those workers renewing their certificates was Bishop. He estimates that he has another year on the Sunrise project before it’s completed. At that point, he’ll likely return to working construction onshore — unless there’s a dramatic shift in offshore wind’s fortunes.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about wind energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.
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