For William “Billy” Bishop, a former Navy sailor and union laborer from Local 1298 on Long Island, the chance to work on the water again arrived two years ago when he first learned about emerging job opportunities in offshore wind construction. The transition felt like a natural fit, merging his maritime background with his extensive background in skilled labor.
After completing a rigorous safety certification program at the National Offshore Wind Training Center — a collaborative initiative between Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, the Long Island Federation of Labor, and multinational wind farm developer Ørsted — Bishop quickly found work on a wind farm near Rhode Island. Today, he is stationed on the Sunrise Wind project, which is currently under construction off the coast of Long Island, New York, where he performs critical structural inspections and maintenance work.
Yet, the rapid political and regulatory changes brought on by the federal government under the Trump administration have introduced profound uncertainty into the sector. Efforts to curb offshore wind projects as part of a broader federal pushback against clean energy initiatives have rippled through training hubs like the NOWTC and shaken the confidence of workers who built their recent careers around the green transition.
“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,” Bishop said. “This might be the last one for a while.”
The current climate stands in sharp contrast to the optimism of 2021, when the federal government set an ambitious target to generate 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade, starting from virtually zero. That monumental goal triggered a massive national effort to build a specialized workforce virtually from scratch. Scaling up the industry at that pace would have required an estimated 77,000 workers to handle everything from manufacturing rugged steel components and building offshore turbines to connecting them to the regional power grid and managing long-term facility operations.
To meet this looming labor deficit, states, major energy developers, universities, unions, and community workforce groups forged powerful coalitions. Together, they launched a diverse array of educational and training pathways, ranging from safety certifications for heavy industrial laborers and specialized apprenticeships for offshore turbine technicians to advanced graduate programs focusing on offshore wind planning and policy.
However, since President Donald Trump returned to office for his second term, the domestic offshore wind sector has faced a barrage of legal, administrative, and economic headwinds. While the administration has simultaneously targeted solar energy and onshore wind development, its regulatory leverage is uniquely powerful offshore, where the federal government acts as the primary landlord for the Outer Continental Shelf.
While the domestic onshore wind industry was already vastly larger than its offshore counterpart and continues to expand for now despite federal resistance, the near-term outlook for offshore wind has turned grim. Industry analysts warn that the consequences could prove long-lasting if private developers shy away from investing capital into a market they now view as overly volatile and politically 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 the time being, offshore wind training institutions are managing the sudden downturn by downsizing operations, pivoting toward broader skill sets that apply to infrastructure careers outside of marine wind, or dispatching their remaining graduates to service the handful of active offshore projects that were already under construction when the political landscape shifted. Despite the severe slowdown, program leaders maintain that an energy-hungry nation will eventually require offshore power, insisting that the wind boom is not dead, but merely 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.”
The American offshore wind industry remains in its infancy. The nation’s first commercial-scale wind farm, located off the coast of Long Island, only began delivering electricity to the grid in December 2023. At that time, billions of dollars in federal grants, tax credits, loans, and other financial incentives deployed under the previous administration fueled expectations of exponential growth. Several substantially larger wind projects were already underway, with dozens more moving steadily through the complex federal permitting pipeline.
A Department of Energy report published in March 2024 warned that the nation faced a severe deficit of qualified wind energy personnel heading toward 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 nationwide wind rush hit a sudden wall on January 20, 2025. One of the first executive actions of Trump’s second term was signing the “wind order,” which enacted an immediate pause on all new federal lease sales and permit approvals for both onshore and offshore wind projects. Later that year, the administration issued emergency stop-work orders targeting the five commercial offshore wind projects actively under construction, citing unspecified national security concerns.
Although those stop-work orders and the initial wind order were eventually overturned through challenges in federal courts, the administration’s broader strategy against the sector persisted across multiple regulatory fronts.
The federal government systematically rolled back renewable energy tax credits—labeling them market-distorting subsidies for unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources—and rescinded hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants previously earmarked for offshore wind infrastructure. Concurrently, officials initiated efforts to revoke existing operational permits, slow down environmental reviews for pending developments, and even began offering financial buyouts to convince wind energy developers to voluntarily surrender their federal offshore leases.
The cumulative effect has severely dimmed the immediate horizon for offshore wind. Roughly 6 gigawatts of offshore capacity remain online or under construction off U.S. coasts, amounting to less than a third of what the prior administration had approved for development. Crucially, no new offshore wind farms have broken ground since the transition of power. This freeze threatens to leave specialized training centers without a viable local market once current construction projects reach completion.
“I think we’re going to be busy into 2027. How deep into 2027, we don’t know,” Clayman noted, referencing the scheduled completion date for Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind project off Long Island. Ørsted declined to be interviewed for this report, as did Equinor, another major European energy developer with significant investments in U.S. offshore wind workforce initiatives.
Similar uncertainties confront trade unions that upskilled their members for specialized offshore roles, such as Pile Drivers Local Union 56 in Boston. Members of the union required specialized training to safely handle massive offshore monopiles weighing up to 1,800 tons. That heavy-lift training infrastructure was backed by international offshore energy firm Deme alongside grants from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. These specialized workers played an instrumental role in constructing Vineyard Wind 1, completed this March off Martha’s Vineyard, and Revolution Wind, a project off Rhode Island that has also finished installing its final turbines.
“Right now, our projects are on the tail end,” said John Dunderdale, business manager for the pile drivers’ union. He noted that while trained personnel recently assisted with projects off New York and even fielded inquiries about supporting overseas wind developments, the immediate domestic pipeline has dried up.
While skilled pile drivers and construction laborers can readily transition to traditional onshore building and infrastructure projects, Dunderdale expressed frustration over the loss of momentum on major regional initiatives like the New England Wind and SouthCoast Wind projects, both of which were on the verge of breaking ground before the administration took office.
“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.”
Other educational institutions are rapidly recalibrating to survive the new regulatory reality. On the campus of Stony Brook University, located a short drive from the NOWTC, undergraduate students recently gathered in a laboratory to study high-voltage direct current (HVDC) wiring. Working around large docking stations, students practiced complex wiring configurations utilizing simulated HVDC systems. Because HVDC technology transmits electricity efficiently over long distances, it remains vital for moving power from remote generation sites—such as distant wind and solar installations—to densely populated urban centers.
The laboratory session is part of a curriculum established in 2024 across State University of New York campuses through the Offshore Wind Training Institute, an initiative backed by $20 million in state and university system funding. Originally designed specifically to supply talent to the nascent offshore wind sector, the program has recently broadened its focus to emphasize versatile HVDC applications, including connecting large-scale solar arrays to battery storage facilities and integrating regional electrical 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 parallel pivot has taken place within “A Taste of the Trades,” a paid summer training initiative for local high school students developed collaboratively by Stony Brook, Suffolk County Community College, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a commercial partner linked to the Sunrise Wind project. While the program initially introduced students to career opportunities explicitly tied to offshore wind through job-site tours and networking events, organizers have since expanded the curriculum to encompass a broader spectrum of electric grid operations and general electrical infrastructure.
As O’Connor observed, the technical skills demanded by offshore wind projects frequently overlap with the broader requirements of the national energy sector. “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,” he said.
Despite the political hostility directed at offshore wind, the broader clean energy economy continues to experience severe labor shortages. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wind turbine technicians and solar photovoltaic installers rank among the fastest-growing occupations nationwide.
“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 affiliate of the American Clean Power Association. “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 regional programs are executing similar strategic realignments. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has redirected a portion of its funding priorities away from offshore wind toward a broader portfolio of marine technology, encompassing coastal resilience projects and marine ecosystem monitoring through environmental DNA analysis in coastal waters. Similarly, a Maryland state job training initiative launched in 2022 to support offshore wind has successfully placed thousands of workers into adjacent manufacturing and technical fields, including aerospace and shipbuilding.
Energy analysts suggest that surging domestic electricity demand and rising operational costs will eventually exert renewed pressure on policymakers to incorporate every available power source into the national grid.
Back at the NOWTC, workers continue to visit the facility, though an increasing share are experienced tradespeople renewing their mandatory safety certifications rather than fresh trainees entering the field for the first time, according to Clayman.
Billy Bishop was among those renewing his credentials this summer. He calculates that he has approximately one year remaining on the Sunrise Wind project before construction concludes. Once that work wraps up, he expects to return to traditional onshore construction—unless a dramatic turnaround alters the trajectory of American offshore wind.