Trump has never been shy about his deep-seated hatred of offshore wind, calling it “pathetic” and “cheap” in his recent address to the United Nations and even claiming that the noise from windmills causes cancer (it doesn’t). On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order halting new offshore wind leasing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a review to consider terminating or amending existing leases. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill includes a bevy of billions in bonuses to the fossil fuel industry, while gutting tax breaks and incentives for wind and solar.
During one of the hottest August’s on record this summer, Trump put his campaign into overdrive, slashing federal funding on a dozen offshore wind projects, issuing stop-work-orders, and withdrawing leases. Trump’s hit list includes offshore wind projects slated for Maryland, where electricity bills were 55 percent higher this summer than five years ago. In Baltimore, electricians are among a coalition of workers who are fighting back, preparing for the “Green Workforce of the Future,” and defending offshore wind.
Rico Albacarys is the political director of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 24 union in Baltimore. Together with several other local unions, business owners, elected officials, and environmental and climate justice groups, Local 24 is part of a coalition working to save offshore wind, viewing it as a key means of protecting good-paying jobs and increasing affordability. “Offshore wind is a big deal for us locally,” Albacarys says.
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“Green Workforce of the Future”
On Halloween, Albacarys led me on a tour of the union’s Apprenticeship and Training Facility in Baltimore. Over 600 trainees a year enter the facility, passing each day under a large forest green banner reading, “Green Workforce of the Future.”
Albacarys is a youthful 41 years old with a manicured black mustache and beard giving off strong Carin León vibes. Born in Puerto Rico, his family moved to Baltimore when he was two years old and he has remained ever since, now raising his own young family here. After working in restaurants and a printing press, he trained to become a journeyman electrician and member of Local 24.
His good looks helped land him in a national TV commercial for the union six years ago, part of a campaign to attract young people in search of a career that will provide a stable, middle-class life for them and their families. The ad features Albacarys’ two young children (he now has three), two dogs, and his wife, Lauren. He notes how many young people are drowning in debt and how “IBEW is the right choice” to a brighter future.
At this training facility, Local 24 is preparing apprentices for what they still believe to be the job growth sectors of the future: solar and wind, including offshore wind projects off the coast of Maryland. The union released a press release in 2023 hailing that it is “on the leading edge of the growth potential of offshore wind power,” with the help of a $2 million federal grant and a new Maryland state law promoting offshore wind. The grant was part of billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress under the Biden administration for unions, companies, colleges, nonprofit organizations and others to train workers to build renewable energy projects and repair aging infrastructure — money the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have largely repealed.
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The training facility had its largest incoming class on record this year, Albacarys tells me, and a few days before my tour, more than 90 new members were sworn in to Local 24.
“You may think, what does this have to do with clean energy?” Albacarys asks as he ushers me into the training facility’s high-voltage cable splicing lab. “This is a really important component for offshore wind turbines,” he explains, demonstrating how apprentices get hands-on learning with different techniques for working on the cables that power turbines. “We apply voltage to make sure it works properly and doesn’t, you know, explode,” Albacarys adds.
Students can move on to receive Global Wind Organization training, or at least that’s the plan. The higher level training costs over $2,000 per person and certification lasts for only two years.
Trump’s effort to squash offshore wind complicates things. “We’re trying to thread the needle between when do we start training folks so we have enough people trained, and not starting to train them too early so they have to get re-certified before they actually are able to work on the turbine,” Albacarys explains.
Bigger Than U.S. Steel
In 2023, the Department of Transportation awarded a $47 million workforce development grant to support an offshore wind manufacturing and logistics hub in Baltimore, one of 12 similar hubs that received funding across the country. Energy developer US Wind plans to build the Baltimore hub, named Sparrows Point Steel, along with more than 100 wind turbines off Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The project is estimated to power approximately 700,000 homes. Maryland approved the project, which secured federal permits in December. In June, it received its most recent permit from the Maryland Department of Environment.
But in August, the Trump administration pulled the $47 million award and then announced its intention to revoke the project’s federal permits. Multiple lawsuits are pending as a judge considers the administration’s request.
IBEW’s electricians are among many workers set to benefit from the project that are committed to seeing it through to completion. At the union’s headquarters across the parking lot from the training facility, I met Jim Strong with the United Steelworkers Union. Strong handed me his card, which bears an unusual title for a steelworker: “Offshore Wind Sector Assistant.” Strong is there to speak at a press conference hosted by IBEW in support of the Maryland project and to kick off a week of similar “Yes to Wind!” events taking place in a dozen states November 15-23. Heavy winds forced the press conference indoors. Other local sponsors include the Ironworkers Local 5 and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Union District Council 51.
Strong explains that crews will be retrofitting the former historic Bethlehem Steel Plant as the site of the new offshore wind hub. There they’ll produce “monopiles,” the ocean-floor bases to which the turbine towers will be secured, and stage towers and blades before moving to offshore construction sites.
Bethlehem Steel was known as “the beast of the east,” Strong tells me. “We had 33,000 members working there at one point.” It was the largest steel production facility in the world in the late 1950s, overtaking U.S. Steel.
When Bethlehem Steel shut down in 2012, it “was a very emotional day,” Strong recalls. “I spoke on behalf of the steel workers when it happened. We had history and now we have a future with the return of steel workers here. So, this is a big deal for our union.”
The site was also the source of persistent heavy pollution, harming workers and the historically Black nearby community of Turner Station. “It has affected our recreation, quality of life, and health,” Gloria Nelson, president of Turner Station Conservation Teams, told the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in 2021. “We had residents coming out of the water bleeding, with sores. We’ve had high rates of cancer and respiratory conditions.” The site has since gone through remediation and was designated a Super Fund site during the Biden administration.
Turner Station Conservation Teams is among other local environmental justice and community organizations who spent decades fighting to clean up the site that now backs the wind project, eager for the transition to green energy. The site will no longer be used to produce steel, but instead for assembling the steel and other components of turbines.
“As health care workers, we know that clean energy saves lives,” Ricarra Jones, political director of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East union, who was unable to attend the press conference, said in a statement. “Reducing air pollution means fewer asthma attacks, fewer kids in emergency rooms, and healthier communities across Maryland. Offshore wind is the prescription our state needs for a cleaner, more resilient, and more affordable energy future.”
Strong calls Trump’s actions, “disappointing,” noting, “he ran on jobs, manufacturing, and steel.” Nonetheless, Strong assures that the project is moving forward. “Eventually we think that wiser people want to take credit for bringing steel back to Sparrows Point.”
“We’re fighting back,” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) tells me after speaking at the press conference. In just the last 48 hours, he says, Maryland’s attorney general filed an amicus brief on behalf of US Wind. “Clearly, getting rid of enough wind to supply hundreds of thousands of homes is going to drive prices higher, that’s simple supply and demand,” Van Hollen says. “The bottom line here is that the fact that the Trump administration canceled those funds did not cancel the overall project.”
“We Don’t Allow Windmills”
Trump sat in the White House in August and declared, “We don’t allow windmills and we don’t want solar panels,” as if the entire nation, including its offshore waters, were one of his private resorts rather than the property of the American people. Three days later, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy cut almost $700 million in funding for 12 offshore wind projects, including the $47 million to Sparrows Point Steel. One project in Humboldt Bay, California, lost out on more than $426 million. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum questioned if using federal lands for wind and solar projects is even permissible under the law and began issuing stop-work orders and attempting to withdraw leases for existing offshore wind operations.
“This summer Maryland had more heat deaths than we’ve had in a decade,” Brittany Baker, the Maryland Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, tells me. Fossil fuel pollution is the primary source of the worsening climate crisis that is making extreme weather events, including heat waves, more frequent, intense, deadly, and costly. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is incredibly important,” Baker says. It can simultaneously secure long-term jobs, revitalize Baltimore, and help achieve energy independence.
The Biden administration set a goal of getting 30 gigawatts of power from offshore wind by 2030, enough for around 10 million homes, with the potential of creating 77,000 jobs. In the first two years following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the domestic offshore wind industry invested more than $6.8 billion in offshore wind manufacturing facilities and ports, as well as 25 vessels and a transmission substation, according to the Department of Energy. Just the expectation of this influx of new electrical power coming online helped drive down electricity costs.
Trump has set out to gut as much of these operations as possible. The administration issued a stop-work order on the $5 billion Revolution Wind project in Rhode Island, which is nearly complete with dozens of turbines already erected and others staged at a nearby pier. The order left an estimated 20-person construction crew stranded at sea, according to The Wall Street Journal. The project is capable of supplying power to more than 350,000 homes. A federal judge temporarily overturned Trump’s order in September, while the administration continues to fight in court.
The administration is also seeking to revoke approval of the last major federal permit needed for the SouthCoast Wind project offshore Nantucket. The project, which has not yet begun construction, includes 141 turbines to power about 840,000 homes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Earlier this month, a federal court judge allowed the administration to reconsider its approval of the permit.
Last week, New York state environmental regulators greenlit a methane gas pipeline considered by some critics to be an alleged quid-pro-quo between governor Kathy Hochul and Trump to let New York’s Empire Wind offshore project proceed despite Trump’s earlier efforts to kill it.
Trump’s wind vendetta is most often attributed to his 2011 losing battle against a windfarm offshore one of his golf courses in Scotland. It could be a lasting chip on his shoulder that keeps him so irrationally and aggressively laser-focused on halting wind projects. Or it may simply be because most of these projects are located in federal waters and as such allow for a much greater role for the federal government than energy projects on state or private property.
Of course, Trump also loves fossil fuel companies. “What you’re seeing from President Trump right now is a tip of the hat to the Big Oil guys,” Van Hollen says. “They don’t like the competition.”
It is not lost on Johnny O, otherwise known as U.S. Congressman Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), that Trump is cutting federal support to green energy while simultaneously increasing subsidies and tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry. “Let’s eliminate those oil and gas subsidies” he tells me. “Because what you’re going to find is that, even without subsidies, clean energy is more cost effective and better for ratepayers.” New research from asset management firm Lazard supports his conclusion, finding that wind and solar energy projects are less expensive to bring online than nearly all fossil fuel projects, even without federal tax incentives.
For Olszewski, who describes growing up in the shadow of Baltimore’s Bethlehem Steel, the transition off of fossil fuels is a “climate imperative, a cost of living imperative, and a jobs imperative.”
Higher Prices, Fewer Jobs
The problem for Trump is that his policies are contributing to rising electricity costs and job loss when most Americans prefer wind and solar to fossil fuels, according to Pew Research Center, and as global momentum is moving away from fossil fuel dependence to renewables.
Trump has reduced both current and planned supply of renewable energy, which is increasing electricity costs across the country. He’s also increasing demand for energy by fast-tracking AI and other data centers. Not only do these centers consume enormous amounts of energy, but just the expectation that they’ll potentially come online is increasing the expectation of future demand, which is increasing prices that utilities are passing on to consumers today.
Fossil fuels are more expensive and far less efficient than renewable sources of energy and doubling down on them raises prices. Trump’s efforts to revitalize the coal industry is saddling consumers with the costs of swaddling an expensive and dying industry. By increasing exports of methane gas (better known as “natural gas,” it is composed almost entirely of methane, while the misnomer “natural” misleads people to think it’s “clean” or “renewable,” which it is not), he’s reducing supply and increasing prices that utilities are passing on to consumers, finds the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Wind power, by contrast, is estimated to have cut at least $137 billion from energy costs in the UK since 2010 by being cheaper and more efficient to provide than gas, according to research by the University College London. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the topic on which Republicans express the most dissatisfaction with their party (after health care) is environmental and climate policy.
For IBEW, energy jobs have driven record membership growth across the country, including in the fossil fuel sector, “but the sustained campaign by the Trump administration against renewable projects has turned potential into disappointment, particularly in the offshore wind industry,” the union notes in a press release. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s actions targeting renewable energy projects extends beyond wind generation.”
Climate Power estimates that more than 158,000 jobs have been lost or stalled in the renewable energy sector in the past year.
Growth in clean energy jobs is outpacing fossil fuels, which, despite historic production, is shedding workers. The U.S. is producing more oil and gas than at any other time in history while at the same time slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs. It takes half as many workers to produce one barrel of oil today than it did a decade ago. In that same time, the U.S oil and gas industry has shed 20 percent of its workforce totaling some 252,000 workers. If we follow the industry model of generously assuming jobs also supported by fossil fuels, then roughly 2 million-plus jobs nationwide have been lost due to shrinking oil and gas employment over the past decade. This trend is set to continue.
“We Built This”
“We need to build things,” Albacarys said in a January podcast with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “We very much want to build data centers. We also would love to build solar generation. We would like to build offshore wind. We want to build things in Maryland.” Like United Steelworkers, IBEW supports an “all of the above” energy strategy and has members that work in fossil fuels. They want to support those workers and ensure a safe and just transition to renewables.
“We built this,” Mike McHale proudly boasts as he stands beside Albacarys under the “Green Energy Jobs of the Future” banner. McHale is the business manager for IBEW Local 24. He explains that the Baltimore training facility I toured is self-funded with money coming directly from the payrolls of union members. There’s a facility pretty much like it in most every major city in the country, he tells me. He then removes his IBEW sweatshirt to reveal a colorful Hawaiian shirt similarly emblazoned with the IBEW logo underneath. “It’s Hawaiian shirt Friday!” he says. “We did it when I was a kid and then we stopped for a while, now all the kids are doing it again.” McHale, now in his late 50s, started off with IBEW when he was just a teenager recently kicked out of college and looking for a career. He found a family.
His pride in the new generation of IBEW members, and in Albacarys standing at his side in particular, is palpable. Albacarys founded IBEW’s Reach Out and Engage Next Generation Electrical Workers committee — an initiative to get young members more involved in the union, and he’s shared his hope to attract other Latinos and people of color to get involved or seek out apprenticeships.
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It’s a far different image from that being advanced by Trump’s Department of Labor. Its newly launched “Project Firewall” social media campaign is pure 1950’s-inspired propaganda that depicts a seemingly exclusively white Christian American workforce.
“We’re not here to dwell in the past,” McHale says. “Rather look to the future, a bright future powered in part by offshore wind.”
