Connecticut invested more than $211 million in a pier built for wind
In 2024, New London Mayor Michael Passero joined a delegation of state and local officials on a tour of the U.K.’s offshore wind industry, along the North Sea coast of the United Kingdom, where he caught a glimpse of what a resurgence of manufacturing might look like back home in Connecticut.
At a factory in Hartlepool, he watched workers assemble underwater cables that carry power from offshore wind farms to shore. He visited a workforce development center run by shipping giant Maersk, where workers trained to service gigantic turbines at sea, and a lab developing submersible robots for jobs too dangerous for humans.
In the port of Blythe — which, like New London, had seen its maritime trades wither through decades of deindustrialization — the harbor had been repurposed as a staging area for the United Kingdom’s offshore wind industry, one of the world’s largest.
“I think the future just looked limitless,” Passero said. “You could almost look to Europe and really see the future here, see everything that can be done. And we have some of the best wind in the world right off the Northeast here, so the industry really looked good there for a while.” Then, he said: “Until Donald Trump got reelected.”
Before the Trump administration’s efforts last year to end future offshore wind development, New London was poised to become a regional hub for developers looking to take advantage of the Atlantic’s abundant winds. The port he returned to had already been rebuilt for that future. Connecticut used more than $211 million in public borrowing to expand the state-owned State Pier in New London so it could load and offload parts onto specialized installation vessels. Ørsted, the Danish energy developer, partnered with local utility Eversource to launch its first three U.S. offshore wind projects from New London, contributing another $100 million to the redevelopment.
In addition to employing thousands of workers during construction, the wind projects were billed as a way to wean the region off its historic dependence on oil and natural gas to meet its growing energy needs.
Revolution Wind, the second of the three Ørsted projects launched from New London, is contracted to sell 704 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 350,000 homes — to customers in Connecticut and Rhode Island. The other two projects, South Fork and Sunrise Wind, are connected to New York through underwater cables.
New London’s State Pier remains a bustling hive of activity. New York’s Sunrise Wind, an Ørsted project, is currently being staged at the pier, but beyond that there are no projects planned. Turbine blades that stretch the length of a football field are stacked on the heavy-lift platform, ready to be transported out to sea on the specialized installation vessel Wind Scylla — named for one of the mythic sea monsters from Homer’s “Odyssey.” The initial run of offshore wind projects is scheduled to last only through 2027. Officials are searching for a future tenant that can take over Ørsted’s position at the pier, but no contracts have been announced.
Just a few years ago, however, the investment in wind was touted by local leaders as a long-term vision for New London’s waterfront. “This is going to be a major facility for decades and decades to come,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont declared during a visit to the then-active construction site in 2022.
New London is an old port city of irregular streets and 19th-century buildings on a 10-square-mile strip of land where the Thames River meets Long Island Sound. Like New Bedford, Massachusetts, it was once home to a large whaling fleet, and it struggled to compete with larger trading ports like New York and Boston after that industry declined. Across the river, in Groton, the waterfront is dominated by the Navy’s primary East Coast submarine base and General Dynamics Electric Boat’s sprawling shipyard. Before the launch of the offshore wind industry, New London’s maritime trade had dwindled to a few ferries to Long Island alongside an underutilized State Pier that imported wood pulp and road salt.
Passero estimated the industry would bring his city roughly $1 million a year through community host agreements, docking fees and crews spending money in the bars and restaurants along Bank Street — a modest sum that would nonetheless provide a boost to Passero’s efforts to reinvigorate the city’s struggling downtown. “You’re not going to fit much in New London, but we got the pier,” Passero said. He also looked north along the Thames River, where textile mills once served as one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. “We’d get our share of what was appropriate to put in New London, but then the whole area — think of this whole river, all the empty factories along the river — I had visions of these factories being repurposed, you know to be able to, provide some of the materials and equipment that’s needed for this industry,” he said.
Before entering politics, Passero worked as a union laborer on several area projects, including the redevelopment of an old railroad bridge and erecting a new laboratory building at Pfizer’s research campus across the harbor in Groton. “It was good money,” he said. “My BA wasn’t going to get me anything.”
The pier work has already sustained one local family. Passero’s son, Thomas Passero, followed his father into the building trades and worked on both the pier redevelopment and the staging of offshore wind projects through Laborers Local 547. With the exception of a short diversion to work on an unrelated highway project, Thomas Passero said the activity has provided a steady stream of income for more than five years, a rarity in the trade, and that pier workers never experienced even a single-day layoff even when the Trump administration ordered a halt to work taking place miles offshore.
“As a New London man, I’ve never seen it so busy,” Thomas Passero said. “And it’s not just the pier, you go down to Ocean Beach and see the cargo ships — cargo ships! It’s pretty cool.” He said he was not too anxious about the future of offshore wind construction. “Being in the trade unions… it’s kind of beaten into us that we’re gonna just build ourselves out of a job and go to another one anyway,” he said. “So how permanent is anything, you know?” Still, he said it was hard to find a job site with consistent hours, years of work and a 10-minute drive from his home and two young children: “I hope it stays busy forever. I hope they keep building windmills or something that we can participate in here.”
The setbacks preceded Trump’s return to office. Ørsted pulled out of two similar projects off New Jersey in 2023, citing rising interest rates and pandemic-era supply chain problems, and cost overruns, delays and technical challenges had already threatened President Joe Biden’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.
Work nonetheless moved forward off Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Virginia. Ørsted’s South Fork Wind began sending power to the grid in 2023, followed over the last year by Revolution Wind, Dominion’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and Avangrid’s Vineyard Wind. The final two projects under construction, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind and Equinor’s Empire Wind, are scheduled to reach commercial operation sometime next year.
Trump administration efforts to halt each of those projects did not stop them. The completed projects are slated to supply a total of 6 gigawatts to the grid by the end of next year, far from the 30-gigawatt goal established by Trump’s predecessor.
Ørsted announced last year that it would shift its focus to “core markets” in Europe and Asia once its current New London work is complete. On an earnings call with investors in February, Ørsted chief executive Rasmus Errboe was blunt about the company’s U.S. prospects. “We have no expectations whatsoever to increase our exposure to offshore wind in the U.S.,” he said.
Eversource’s president of transmission, Bill Quinlan, speaking at Yale University in May, said the industry had been severely weakened by macroeconomic forces and “nonconstructive federal policy.” Eversource exited the offshore wind industry in 2024, selling its stake in two projects for $745 million. While the current slate of projects is likely to be completed, Quinlan said, it could be some time before new projects are announced. “I would set that aside for the time being, I don’t see [wind] making a significant comeback in the near term in this country,” Quinlan said. “I think developers — the international developers who have the expertise — are probably going to stand on the sidelines for a period of time here in the U.S.”
As those connections get up and running, much of the work will dry up. If the Trump administration succeeds in its ongoing efforts to end future offshore wind development in the United States — which by recent accounts is likely — it would eliminate thousands of current and future jobs on America’s waterfronts from Massachusetts to Virginia. Many of these jobs are located in struggling seaports like New Bedford, Mass., and New London, Conn., where states invested hundreds of millions of dollars in port infrastructure and workforce training to court giant offshore wind companies. Workers who have undergone specialized training or pinned their futures on the promise of steady offshore wind construction could find themselves unable to continue working in the industry. The resulting uncertainty has led international developers to redirect investment toward other countries or sell back their leases, leaving purpose-built piers at risk of sitting empty — as is already the case in New Bedford.
The reporting was produced by News From The States in collaboration with ProPublica’s Sustainability Desk, a project of the Local Reporting Network, with the Connecticut Mirror, The New Bedford Light and Ocean State Media.