It Was Supposed to Be a Lifeline for a Blue-Collar Town. Then Trump Returned.

NEW BEDFORD, Mass — The dock that launched U.S. offshore wind is mostly empty now. The 200-foot-tall tower pieces that loomed like skyscrapers over a harbor of fishing trawlers are gone. So too are the house-sized gearboxes and turbine blades stretching the length of a soccer field.

The big turbine parts were supposed to represent a new era in a city where fish houses and abandoned factories line the waterfront. They were assembled here, sent out to sea and installed as part of Vineyard Wind, the largest renewable energy project built to-date east of the Mississippi River. All that was left on a recent April day were empty blade racks, a pair of red cranes and three broken blades.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this.

Vineyard Wind was supposed to be the first of many. Instead, it may be the only offshore wind project ever built in New Bedford.

This city of Portuguese, Latino and Cape Verdean residents is ground zero for America’s offshore wind industry, a test case of whether a blue collar fishing town can forge a new economic future by raising massive turbines out at sea.

Former President Joe Biden and governors of Northeast states saw offshore wind as a way to power the economy, fight climate change and create a wave of blue collar jobs in port communities hollowed out by deindustrialization and consolidation of the fishing industry. But the industry has been battered by rising construction costs and mounting political opposition from coastal communities and fishermen, who worry it will destroy the marine ecosystem and pristine ocean views.

And that’s before getting to President Donald Trump. The president has made combatting offshore wind a hallmark of his second term. He has eliminated tax credits for the industry and tried to rip up permits for future projects. In December, he attempted to halt construction of five offshore wind projects — including Vineyard Wind — in the name of national security. Courts rejected the argument that the turbines posed a security threat and allowed work on all five to continue.

But Trump was undeterred.

"I’m proudly telling you that we’re going to try and have no windmills built in the United States,” he told reporters at a White House event in March. (The White House did not respond to requests for comment.)

New Bedford is at the center of it all.

Offshore wind has left a mixed legacy here. Nearly a decade spent building the country’s first major project helped spur more than $1 billion in investments to the local port. Thousands of construction workers descended on the city, filling its restaurants and hotels. Now, out at sea, Vineyard Wind has started generating power, injecting a wave of green electrons into a region overwhelmingly reliant on natural gas.

But building wind projects only provides temporary work. City leaders hoped there would eventually be enough wind projects dotting the East Coast to attract a turbine factory or another manufacturing facility, something permanent that could add economic ballast to a community where fortunes rise and fall with the price of scallops. That hasn’t happened, thanks to a combination of factors, from higher interest rates to rising project costs — and Trump.

Trump’s attempts to halt projects under construction mean none are likely to be built for the foreseeable future, leaving New Bedford to ponder what, if anything, it gained.

Said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell: “We've essentially resigned ourselves to not seeing any projects proceed for the balance of the Trump administration.”

The completion of Vineyard Wind represents the culmination of a quarter-century journey, one that required overcoming substantial political opposition, manufacturing delays and a major accident. It also figures to provide a substantial boost to New England’s six-state electric grid, generating enough power to satisfy roughly 7 percent of Massachusetts’ annual electricity needs. Federal energy data shows that New England wind generation was up more than a third in the first four months of the year, and that’s with most of the project’s turbines still undergoing testing.

Add it all up, and you would expect people here to be celebrating. But Vineyard Wind was finished with little more than a peep or, to be more precise, nothing more than a two-sentence email from a project spokesperson.

Part of that is because of Trump. Privately, industry representatives say they are terrified to speak about the project in public for fear any word they utter could prompt an angry reaction from the president.

Yet it is also hard for them to avoid the feelings of disappointment. Offshore wind was supposed to represent something more. When I made my first reporting trip to New Bedford almost a decade ago, local leaders were flush with optimism about what offshore wind could mean for their city. Many had just returned from Europe, where they witnessed firsthand how offshore wind could transform struggling fishing towns into bustling green industrial hubs.

That feels almost naive now.

“It is very disheartening,” Carlos Avila told me as we walked the hurricane barrier ringing New Bedford’s harbor on a brisk April day.

A community engagement director at the Environmental League of Massachusetts, Avila’s main task today is convincing his neighbors to keep the faith with offshore wind. While he remains a true believer, convinced it can lift the fortunes of this port city, others in his community aren’t so sure.

“It's tough to keep people mentally in the game, especially when they fought hard to get what they got,” he said. “That's the problem. There's no closure with this.”

New Bedford’s relationship with offshore wind began in 2001, when an energy developer named Jim Gordon proposed installing 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. Dubbing his project “Cape Wind,” Gordon called the area off the southern coast of Massachusetts, “the Saudi Arabia of Wind.” The idea of capturing the stiff breeze over the North Atlantic Ocean made for an enticing sales pitch in a region where the vast majority of energy supplies are imported, especially as concerns over climate change were beginning to gain traction.

New Bedford was supposed to be the place to build Cape Wind. The project was sold as a lifeline to a city where a copper mill that traced its roots back to Paul Revere closed in 2008. Unemployment and the numbers of families living in poverty have long exceeded the state average.

“We're an older industrial city in the Northeast that's not part of a major metro. We've gotta hustle to attract capital here and, for us, offshore wind has always been a generational opportunity,” said Mitchell, who has championed offshore wind since taking office in 2012.

Massachusetts invested $113 million into the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal as part of the plan to build Cape Wind, transforming what had been an old superfund site along the harbor’s edge into a staging ground for wind projects.

But the idea of installing more wind turbines within eyesight of wealthy Cape Cod was extremely controversial. Cape Wind ran into heated opposition from the likes of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the conservative business mogul William Koch. They argued the wind turbines would destroy the marine ecosystem — and mar their view of the stunning Massachusetts coast.

The project became mired in lawsuits and was ultimately abandoned in 2017.

As the Cape Wind lawsuits played out, the marine terminal in New Bedford sat empty. To many locals, it seemed like a monument to all the city’s broken promises, like the plans for a casino, which came and went, and a commuter rail link to Boston, which was only recently completed after decades of inaction.

The empty dock only fed local doubts that offshore wind would ever arrive in New Bedford.

“It was a difficult case to make,” Mitchell said. “There was a sort of ‘Waiting for Godot’ attitude among a lot of folks who said, ‘Well, you promised us this, Mayor, but we're not seeing it.’”

Vineyard Wind started to change that. The project nailed down a 20-year contract to sell power to Massachusetts’ utilities in 2018 at a price so low that states up and down the East Coast were soon racing to sign up their own wind projects.

When Biden was elected president, he made offshore wind a centerpiece of his climate strategy. His administration permitted 11 projects, as part of a goal of powering 10 million homes with offshore wind by 2030. At its most basic, Biden’s pitch was that cutting pollution via offshore wind could be good for jobs and the economy.

And, for a minute, New Bedford seemed to validate his plans.

A second project, New England Wind, struck a deal to sell power to Massachusetts and agreed to use the city as a staging area. As part of its economic development package with the state, a Danish company that manufactures cranes used aboard offshore installation vessels agreed to build a factory in the city. A third project, SouthCoast Wind, planned to use New Bedford as an operations hub. Its economic development plan called for an Italian company to build a factory that made subsea transmission cables on the grounds of a shuttered coal plant in a nearby town.

Biden himself visited the old coal plant for a major climate speech in the summer of 2023. By then, the wind seemed firmly at the industry’s back. Earlier that spring Vineyard Wind’s first turbine parts arrived in New Bedford aboard a massive cargo ship. A small crowd gathered on the hurricane barrier to watch the ship pull into the long vacant marine commerce terminal. Mayor Mitchell held an impromptu press conference along the water’s edge where he argued the components’ arrival should dispel skepticism about the industry.

“Seeing is believing,” he declared at the time.

But what seemed like the beginning of something big turned out to be the climax. The very next day local dockworkers staged a strike, claiming they had been pushed out by construction workers tasked with assembling the turbines. The dockworkers reached an agreement with Vineyard Wind six days later, but other problems soon began to mount. Delays manufacturing the project’s components meant the 62-turbine project almost immediately fell behind schedule.

Then, in the summer of 2024, a turbine blade detached and crashed into the ocean. Bits of fiberglass washed up on beaches on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Seventy-two turbine blades installed at the time had to be taken down and replaced due to manufacturing defects. Replacement blades were shipped in from France because of quality control issues at a Canadian factory operated by GE Vernova, the turbine maker supplying the project.

Yet Vineyard Wind turned out to be lucky by industry standards. Other projects like New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind soon found themselves navigating the post-Covid inflation wave, which forced them to raise their costs and prompted them to cancel their power contracts with Massachusetts in an attempt to secure better financial terms.

Vineyard Wind survived the financial tumult, having already locked in its contracts with suppliers.

But the political winds were also shifting. On the campaign trail that summer, Trump rallied against offshore wind. At a campaign stop in New Jersey, a large crowd loudly cheered his promise “to make sure that ends on Day One.” 

“They destroy everything. They're horrible. And the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said.

(Vineyard Wind’s two power contracts are slightly more expensive than the average wholesale electricity prices in New England, but significantly cheaper than winter time power prices. That is one of the factors that drew Massachusetts to offshore wind in the first place: Winds over the North Atlantic tend to blow hardest in the winter.)

Back at the White House in 2025, Trump quickly delivered. On the first day of his second term, he halted new leases and ordered a review of existing permits. On July 4, he signed a law phasing out tax credits for renewable energy projects. And in late 2025, he issued an order directing construction to stop at Vineyard Wind and four other projects underway further down the East Coast.

Vineyard Wind sued successfully and finished construction, but the wider damage was done.

The work stoppage proved extremely expensive, spooking investors behind other offshore wind projects. In court documents, Vineyard Wind estimated it lost $2 million a day during the stoppage. It was stopped for 36 days.

One industry executive, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told me in December that offshore wind developers cannot afford that level of political risk — and may not return to the U.S. even after Trump leaves office.

Today, there are six major projects around the country that have either completed construction, like Vineyard Wind, or are actively being built. Collectively, they will be able to generate enough power to supply roughly 2.5 million homes, a far cry from the 10 million targeted by Biden.

The future for everything after that looks grim. Projects like New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind are in court fighting Trump’s attempts to rip up their Biden-era permits

Others have already given up. Three projects recently struck deals with the Trump administration to return their federal leases.

To try and make sense of it all, I met up with Avila and had him show me around the city for a day.

Avila isn’t like the other Massachusetts environmentalists I have met over the years. He isn’t from an affluent white family. A linebacker-sized man who sports a shaved head and a goatee, he was born in Puerto Rico and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He is the first in his family to graduate from college and buy a house. He has lived in New Bedford for more than two decades.

Avila also doesn’t talk about offshore wind like other environmentalists. When talking to other industry supporters in recent years, it could sometimes feel like offshore wind had magical powers: It was going to cut carbon, reduce electric bills, create jobs and address environmental justice. There was nothing, it seemed, that offshore wind couldn’t do.

But Avila doesn’t talk like that. In conversations, he openly mused about whether the industry and its supporters had promised too much. He said it was naive to think offshore wind could snap its fingers and solve decades of environmental inequities, with communities of color bearing the brunt of pollution from local industry while enjoying few of its economic benefits.

He wondered if the state should have spent more time attracting smaller companies that support the industry, instead of trying to land a great white whale like a turbine factory. His idea: Maybe someone local could make the giant bags used to lift gear onto vessels traveling to and from the site.

Yet none of those doubts dull Avila’s passion for offshore wind. He stumbled onto the industry almost by accident, recruiting students for a training program at the local community college because no one else wanted to do so. He’s now invested more than a decade of his life into offshore wind, most of it centered on preparing people to work in the industry.

“I wanted other people to have equal or better opportunities than I had,” he said.

Avila and I met up at a coffee shop that has taken up residence next to the ferry terminal to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. New Bedford is bisected by a state highway. On one side is the downtown, which climbs a hill away from the harbor. It looks like an AI-generated postcard of New England: Old brick buildings and weathered wood shingled homes line a web of narrow cobblestone streets.

There is a museum, which celebrates the city’s history as the one-time whaling capital of the world. Herman Melville embarked on his famous odyssey from New Bedford. The city also offered safe harbor to enslaved people on the run, including Frederick Douglass.

The coffee shop where Avila and I met is on the other side of the road. Unlike many coastal towns, the waterfront here is decidedly unglamorous. The smell of fish, salt and diesel fumes wafts in the air. New Bedford is a working harbor, the top grossing commercial fishing port in the United States. Fish processing facilities, shipyards and warehouses line the waterfront.

There are subtle signs of offshore wind here and there. A defunct power plant was torn down to make way for a terminal serving the industry. The contaminated grounds of the old copper mill are being redeveloped into a marine terminal. An observer standing by the water might see a CTV, or crew transfer vessel, departing from the nearby logistics hub on Pope Island, ferrying people and equipment out to Vineyard Wind

A recent report submitted by Vineyard Wind to the state concluded some 3,700 people worked directly on the project and generated $1.9 billion in salaries and local investments. Mitchell estimates that the project helped catalyze roughly $1.2 billion in port investments over the last decade, enabling the city to qualify for grants like dredging projects it would have not otherwise received.

But standing by the ferry terminal recently, you could be forgiven for not knowing any of that. On the day I visited recently, fishing trawlers were tethered to docks jetting out into the harbor, much as they always are. Some idled, engines grunting, as their crews prepared to cast off. It frankly seemed like little had changed in a decade.

After a chat, we headed to Pope Island on the other side of the harbor. That was where we met Josh Rand, a local boat captain Avila recruited out of high school to attend the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, a college that prepares students for a career at sea.

Rand took us onto his ship, the Windea Intrepid. A crew transfer vessel that ferries people and goods to and from Vineyard Wind, it is an immaculate boat tricked out with plush seats and personal TV screens for workers to enjoy on a 40-mile journey to the wind farm that can take up to four hours due to federal speed restrictions on vessel traffic.

Like Avila, Rand, 30, has taken a circuitous route toward a career in offshore wind. He went to Mass Maritime because he always wanted a career on the water. Rand, a big man with a scruffy beard who speaks with a thick South Shore Massachusetts accent, traveled the world working on cargo vessels after graduating. But he always wanted to come home and start a family. So when the opportunity came up to captain the Intrepid, he jumped.

“I could drive to work versus flying,” he said. “To be home and be home more often and have the ability to be closer to family and friends was huge.”

This is the type of story that leaders like Biden and Mitchell dreamed of when they took the plunge on offshore wind: a local kid, finding a good-paying clean energy job near his home town.

But how much longer this fairy tale lasts is uncertain.

The Intrepid has a contract to work on Vineyard Wind for five years, an enviable amount of stability in an industry upended by political and economic tumult. Then it's unclear.

“It's hard to plan for the future when you don't know what projects are gonna get approved or not, right?,” Rand said. “Do I know that in five years when this contract is up, I could get laid off? Sure, but you try to do the best job you can, and you try to build a relationship with a customer. You hope that a five-year contract turns into 20.”

Rand is no fan of the Trump administration, but many of the people he works with like the president, even though he has tried to shut down the industry.

“We have some captains here who are, like, the biggest Trump supporters in the world. It's just funny,” Rand said. “He's literally taking jobs out of our pockets. We're shutting these projects down. And I'm like, guy, what are you doing?’”

The best place to get a glimpse of Vineyard Wind’s progress, or lack thereof, is from the hurricane barrier protecting New Bedford’s harbor. A narrow ribbon of water separates the marine commerce terminal where the project was staged from a sidewalk at the base of the barrier.

After the arrival of the first turbine parts three years ago, the site became a beehive of activity. People, cranes and SPMTs, essentially mechanized platforms for moving large pieces of equipment, buzzed about the site.

But on the day I visited, the site was dead. A pair of workers in red coveralls and hard hats eyed a large empty blade rack. They appeared to be the only people on site.

It was similarly quiet across the harbor at Pope’s Island, a dock owned by a local fishing family that has been another major hub for offshore wind in the city. During construction, the parking lot was packed with the vehicles of contractors working on Vineyard Wind.

But the parking lot was mostly empty as we left the Intrepid and made our way to a warehouse owned by the Quinn family. A fixture of the city’s fishing industry, the Quinns own a fleet of scalloping boats. Unlike many fishermen, who resisted the industry’s arrival, the Quinns welcomed it. They revamped the docks at Pope Island to serve as a logistics hub for offshore wind. The family also purchased the old copper mill site, and are redeveloping it into a commercial marine terminal.

“Having these other boats coming in and out to have maintenance done — you know, oil changes, filters, food, water, all these things — that's good for the economy,” said Mike Quinn, who helps run the family business, when we sat down in his spartan warehouse office.

As a fisherman, he initially wasn’t wild about the arrival of an industry that could push him off his fishing grounds. But as a businessman, he spied an opportunity.

It was a unique take. The politics of offshore wind are usually pretty black or white. People love it or hate it. Quinn was one of the rare people in-between.

“I think people may have had a false expectation of what it really was going to provide,” Quinn said. “I mean, at the end of the day it's a construction project. Like any construction project, there's a huge boom and then it dwindles out, right? It's built. There's less things to do.”

Vineyard Wind delivered for his family. In addition to using Pope’s Island, the project hired his scallop boats to work as marine wildlife spotters, alerting construction vessels to stop work if endangered whales, turtles or other wildlife entered the construction area. His boats fished an average of 50 days a year over the last decade. This year they will fish an average of 36 days. The spotting work helped fill the gap, delivering 10 to 20 days of work every other month during construction.

Even so, Quinn has mixed feelings about the industry’s future. He is opposed to projects serving New York and New Jersey further south. They are located on prime scalloping grounds where he and others based out of New Bedford fish.

But he supports projects off the Massachusetts coast. His family started an offshore wind logistics company, Shoreline Offshore, that would benefit greatly if projects like New England Wind eventually move forward. Yet planning the trajectory of that business is difficult given all the uncertainty over offshore wind’s future, he said.

Either way, Quinn’s strategy is the same: As long as offshore wind is a possibility, his aim is to direct the turbines away from fishing grounds and get as much out of the industry as possible.

Alluding to his project at Pope Island, he said, “if that's just a dock that will be here for 30 years for fishing boats to tie up to, well, that's one more dock that we didn't have before.”

Thinking about it later, it struck me that this might be the lesson from New Bedford’s experience. Out at sea, Vineyard Wind has started generating electricity. But here on land, what’s left is a series of upgraded docks that can serve this port city for decades to come. And maybe, at the end of the day, that’s worth acknowledging for what it is: More than what New Bedford had, but less than what it wanted.