JENS B’TTNER/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP PHOTO
The East Coast’s geography in particular is ideal for offshore wind energy.
Wind farms in 42 states provided about 7 percent of U.S. power needs in 2019, a figure that is expected to grow. But offshore wind is the exciting growth area for technology and jobs, as well as renewable energy. The East Coast’s geography, in particular, is ideal for offshore wind energy: The ocean is shallow enough for anchored turbine towers; and because so many people live near the coast, offshore wind energy could be an easier way to bring an energy source closer to where demand is greatest.
According to Mike Fishman, president and executive director of the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, “We see this as kind of the inflection point for the whole system and paradigm from oil and gas to renewables. And on the East Coast, there’s going to be a massive amount of offshore wind. Probably we’ll see 2,000 to 4,000 towers being built over the next 10 or 20 years.”
The United States has the potential to harness more than 2,000 gigawatts of energy from offshore wind, according to the Global Offshore Wind Report. The Department of Energy estimates that East Coast offshore has the potential to provide about 35 percent of power needs for the entire country by 2050. But that will require supportive policies and a politics to match.
Rhode Island was the first state, in 2016, to install its five turbines off about 16 miles of coastline near Block Island. The 30-megawatt project supplies more than enough energy to the 1,000 year-round residents on the island and even sends some energy to the rest of the state when there are surpluses. While the project did at first meet some resistance from local residents who weren’t keen on the aesthetics of the windmills on their coastline, the commitment from the state government in partnership with the local electrical and steel workers unions prevailed.
Virginia quickly followed with the country’s second offshore wind farm. But the boldest visions for offshore wind have come from New York state and New Jersey, where the political clout of unions has even inspired other states to retroactively add better prevailing-wage standards to their offshore wind projects.
New York state’s windmill plan will depend on the installation and maintenance of hundreds of wind turbines, many of which will be around New York City and Long Island. The proximity of the wind turbines to the urban center that has the highest demand for energy will be a visual reminder of another benefit of costal wind farms. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a mandate in 2019 to procure nine gigawatts of energy from offshore wind by 2035, of which 4.2 gigawatts has already been contracted.
Neighboring New Jersey has a 7.5-gigawatt commitment by 2035 signed into order by Gov. Phil Murphy, and the 1.1-gigawatt project 15 miles into the ocean from Atlantic City should be in operation by 2024. And adding to the Mid-Atlantic interest now are Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut. (Maine is also delving into offshore wind energy, but the oceans are deeper and the state will be using a different kind of floating wind turbine technology.)
These projects will also require new investment in ports in the Mid-Atlantic, like at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, in addition to building totally new sites, as in New Bedford, Massachusetts (the first port built specifically for offshore wind in the U.S.). This backing comes from the state governments, which also sign commitments to buy the energy at an agreed-upon price per kilowatt-hour from the private companies that are contracted to harness the energy and construct the massive windmills.
The private companies, some domestic and some European, then become clients of the state government and can ask for certain labor standards, called “project labor agreements,” to be included in the project proposals. Plans from competing companies that want to be involved in this budding sector get ranked on a point system, where more points can be earned for better labor practices.
These agreements are a result of strategic union organizing and politicking.
“The main goal for us was to get an institutional framework to address the dual crises of income inequality with the creation of good jobs but also helping to address climate change, and we see the two as being interconnected,” says Vinny Alvarez, president of New York City’s Central Labor Council. “And [the objective] continues to be: create good jobs with labor standards along with ongoing effort to help assist with climate change.
The novelty of offshore wind energy meant that unions had an opportunity to create the status quo for this sector.
“Sometimes it’s ensuring labor standards are in the legislation, sometimes it’s in RFPs [requests for proposal] that are going out for work, but it’s always ensuring that wherever the work is being done that the workers have a right to have a voice at work,” Alvarez adds. “We see much of this work [in green energy] going to non-union sectors, typically to low-wage jobs. And we want to make sure that we reverse that trend. We think it’s possible to do and we are just focused on that effort like a laser here in the city.”
WITH OFFSHORE WIND, consumers get the benefits of increasingly more affordable energy. On Block Island, the price of wind energy is now less than oil and gas. Union members can get access to good-paying jobs in a growing sector. And everyone benefits from the shift to renewable energy in the fight against human-caused climate change.
The novelty of offshore wind energy meant that unions had an opportunity to create the labor terms for this sector, setting the expectation that these programs will have project labor agreements as the industry grows. This is in contrast with most of the United States’ onshore wind farms, many of which rely on the wind production tax credit, a financial incentive that doesn’t have any labor standards attached to it.
Offshore wind development, with these labor standards in place from the start, has the potential to bring high-wage, high-skill work, starting with the steel work of welding, and assembly of wind turbines, which happens both at ports near the installation sites and then on ships off the U.S. coasts. Wind turbines can be up to 400 feet tall, with their blades measuring the length of about eight school buses, a massive project that requires whole teams of workers. The process of getting that electricity from a wind generator to a transmission grid is done onshore. With the offshore wind plans currently committed to by states, the work will lead to about 3,000 jobs year-round for installation and maintenance, Fishman explains, and more as the sector expands.
While unions are now connected to the installation of these new wind turbines, the parts and components are currently not being made in the United States. Labor leaders say they definitely could be. “It’s great to get the construction work to put the turbines up, but there’s a lot of work—most studies say twice as much work—in the manufacturing and assembly,” says Lara Skinner, director of Cornell University’s Labor Leading on Climate Initiative. “So as we build up an offshore wind industry in the U.S., we don’t want it to be just the construction; we want it to be doing a significant amount of manufacturing and assembly as well.”
Denmark is among the leaders in the offshore wind sector, supplying nearly half of the country’s electricity consumption with wind energy. And the New York labor movement has leaned on the Danes’ expertise. There have been several trips to Denmark to learn from the workers and companies supported by Cornell after Hurricane Sandy, and more visits could be part of American union member training in the future.
States and the federal government have the power to bring those manufacturing jobs to the U.S., Skinner says. With the same power and political determination that included project labor agreements and prevailing-wage agreements in the initial offshore wind goals, elected officials can include requirements that the components to make turbines are themselves made in the United States.
“To get to the point where the towers are out in the ocean, there’s a lot of onshore work that needs to be done to support the construction and then ultimately the maintenance of those towers and some of the component parts on the supply chain to build the amount of towers that New York and other states are committed to,” Alvarez says.
For the initial projects from New York and New Jersey, which are just a fraction of their longer-term projections, about 400 wind turbines need to be built.
“One of the potentials is the tremendous economic impact for this region in support of an industry that’s going to be here for many years,” says Alvarez. “[With] the volume of work that New York and other states are committing to, there’s an opportunity for us to ensure that there is an economic impact that’s going to be felt in the cities, in the state that is close to where the assembly is of these offshore wind turbines.”
So far, there is no federal commitment to invest in offshore wind energy. While the federal government leases out the coastal space for these projects, there isn’t a larger national strategy. States, instead, are left to handle their energy ambitions in a piecemeal fashion.
With a large green infrastructure plan on the table for later this year, the Biden administration has already announced an ambitious plan to support domestic production of electric vehicles with requirements that those vehicles are made in the United States. Skinner says this is encouraging because a similar commitment could be made for offshore wind.
XU CONGJUN/AP PHOTO
Wind turbine manufacturing needs a similar commitment as the Biden administration is giving domestic production of electric vehicles.
First steps from the federal government could come from simply setting a national goal for offshore wind energy production in the U.S. and opening up more areas for federal leasing, says Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Change and Business Program at UCLA and UC Berkeley Schools of Law. Permitting, in fact, is one way the federal government slows down the implementation of offshore wind projects that states want to pursue.
There are many other ways the federal government could get more involved, Skinner says, from smaller changes like leasing more ocean space to states for the individual projects to bolder planning projects like negotiating directly with offshore wind companies to create national commitments to the clean-energy source. The U.S. government could even buy the turbines outright and begin operating them itself.
Additionally, continuing tax credit programs, like the wind energy production tax credit that was renewed in 2020, could continue to boost the economic benefits of investing in offshore wind. This tax incentive has bipartisan support in Washington, but it then puts the onus on the labor movement to fight for project labor and prevailing-wage agreements on the state level. This also leaves manufacturing decisions to the states.
Smaller-scale efforts, however, have the potential to be equally as effective when it comes to upping the usage of all forms of renewable energy, Elkind says. Policies implemented by different government agencies and by different sectors can increase the “durability” of the Biden administration’s efforts.
Looking at Block Island’s wind farm as an example, even with such a small project (30 megawatts and five turbines), workers earn between $28 and $40 per hour plus benefits. During construction, it also created 300 local jobs.
But unions are not without their own internal challenges.
As organized labor promotes project labor agreements and its alliance with climate activists, it also has to reckon with its own issues of inclusion: Historically, some craft unions have excluded people who aren’t white and aren’t male, sometimes unintentionally and other times deliberately. To truly combat the dual crises of climate change and inequality, trade unions have to actively work to improve their outreach to a wider group of people.
“The leadership still tends to be white guys, but that will change over time,” Fishman says. “And I think around the country especially now in this last year of fighting, especially now in the big cities, there’s been a real effort to make sure that the building trades are making sure that they’re reaching out into communities.”
Most green-energy jobs that are currently available in the country are low-wage work.
Unions offer one of the largest education and training programs in the country, second only to the U.S. military. The recognition that those services haven’t always been accessible to all people has led to more conscious efforts today. People of color, women, veterans, and formerly incarcerated people are among today’s targeted groups for recruitment into pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs.
North America’s Building Trades Unions of the AFL-CIO collectively have 175 different training programs and before the pandemic put more than 7,000 people through their paid training course on the path to a career in the trades. President Sean McGarvey explains that there are also efforts to partner with local and regional community groups, urban leagues, and youth projects.
On Long Island, where residents may see offshore wind turbines sending power to their homes as early as next year, Climate Jobs New York organizer Mariah Dignan focuses on engaging union members on the future offshore wind projects and opportunities, as well as the community. Prior to COVID-19, there were events and forums as well as partnerships with local officials and other trusted community leaders, like pastors and small-business owners.
In New York City alone, there are four specific programs to help with outreach to more diverse and underserved demographics through the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents 15 different locals. Nontraditional Employment for Women, also called NEW, prepares women for careers in the building trades; New York Helmets to Hardhats does specific outreach to veterans and active-duty National Guard members; and Pathways to Apprenticeship (P 2 A) and CSKILLS (Construction Skills) both provide apprenticeship readiness programs with courses and mentorship for people from low-income communities and high school seniors in public schools across the city.
There are similar programs in unions across the country targeting outreach to people of color, women, veterans, and formerly incarcerated people that all work in synergy with broader community organizing and outreach.
The potential to engage a more diverse set of recruits into the trades is also strengthened by projects that are more local or community-centered compared to offshore wind energy, such as retrofitting buildings and schools. Fishman says retrofitting schools with solar panels and other infrastructure upgrades is an example of the kind of work that can benefit underserved communities while also providing good-paying jobs in the process.
But projects branded as “green” or “climate friendly” can also face a more political kind of pushback within unions. During the past two presidential elections, in 2016 and 2020, issues were often framed, especially by the right, as being either good for labor or good for the environment, not both.
The New York Times’ flagship podcast focused an episode on unionized workers harvesting natural gas in Pennsylvania who wouldn’t vote for Democrats if they supported policies focused on climate change. And President Trump spent much of his rhetorical energy pledging to save coal mining jobs (which are now substantially automated operations that employ a shrinking number of people per year) while also claiming that windmills cause cancer.
With the right mix of policies, the supposed choice between retaining middle-class, union jobs and confronting the climate crisis is false. But there’s still work to be done to show union members across the country that leaders are serious about a just transition for workers who stand to lose good-paying jobs in fossil fuel industries.
For starters, the definition of what a “green job” is needs to be expanded, says Anna Fendley, director of regulatory and state policy for the United Steelworkers. Her organization represents workers in manufacturing, including those in oil refineries.
“It’s really important that manufacturing workers in those jobs see themselves as part of the economy of the future,” Fendley says. “[In terms of] clean manufacturing, jobs [should be] part of the conversation [and] the broad definition of what is a clean job or green job. If you’re making lightweight aluminum to make cars more efficient, that’s a green job. How we define green jobs is really important.”
Most green-energy jobs, such as weatherization, retrofitting, and installation of solar panels, that are currently available in the country are relatively low-wage work, especially compared to well-paid work in refineries or on pipelines. Many workers have a low regard for climate jobs. Offshore wind’s collaboration with unionized labor is atypical in the U.S. green-energy sector.
“When you tell people that they need to transition into the new green economy, it’s pretty hard to do when they’re not middle-class family-sustaining wages and you’re asking people to take pretty dramatic pay cuts and lose benefits and pensions to go work in this new green economy as it stands right now,” McGarvey says.
Working-class people across the country, unionized and not, know that wages have been stagnant for decades, and they’ve heard the promises about “green jobs” for just as long. McGarvey argues that at least a portion of both Trump and Biden supporters could agree on a lot when it comes to economic opportunity.
But again, Biden’s commitments to the working class are giving the labor movement hope that things will be different this time.
“He understands better than most what it takes for a family to achieve the American dream in the United States,” McGarvey says, of President Biden. “You know from what’s going on in this country in the last several years, in particular this last year, the frustration and the anger [which] for the most part on both sides has to do with economic opportunity.”
