DORCHESTER, New Jersey — The Ram XV liftboat was preparing to get to work on a wind project off Long Island last April when plans suddenly changed.
The Trump administration issued a stop-work order on New York’s Empire Wind 1 project, bringing construction to a standstill. The boat was no longer needed.
The specialized vessel hailed from the Gulf of Mexico, a region where boats have long served offshore oil and gas projects. In recent years, boat operators have jumped at opportunities in the East Coast’s burgeoning offshore wind industry.
But Louisiana-based Aries Marine found itself stuck far from home with no work to do.
“No income means instant losses,” said Courtney Ramsay, the CEO of Aries Marine, from the bridge of the Ram XV while it was moored in New Jersey this month. “The margins are thin because of the sporadic work. The point of having these vessels is to keep them utilized. Sitting at the dock like this doesn’t pay the bills.”
Since his return to office last January, President Donald Trump has sought to shut down the U.S. offshore wind industry, prohibiting new projects from getting permits and trying to halt projects already under construction.
A month after the April stop-work order, Empire Wind was allowed to resume construction. But other projects, such as Revolution Wind in New England, separately got stop-work orders last year. In December, all five projects being built on the Eastern Seaboard were halted.
The federal government’s hostility to wind energy has darkened the outlooks for the industry’s workforce, which during the Biden administration had prepared for a thrum of construction after nearly a dozen projects got final permits.
While interventions from federal judges have allowed work to continue on four of the five projects under construction, a once-promising business opportunity for many companies now looks more uncertain.
“The longevity of it is in question,” Ramsay said. “It certainly doesn’t look as optimistic.”
Aries Marine is currently looking for work with the offshore wind projects that have gotten back under construction in recent weeks. The company hopes to return to the Empire Wind job that was canceled last year, which involved clearing debris from the ocean floor to allow for cables to be laid that will connect turbines to the power grid.
Empire Wind 1 is 60 percent complete, and construction has resumed since the project received relief from a federal judge earlier this month, David Schoetz, a spokesperson for Equinor, the developer, said Thursday.
Dozens of vessels have worked on the project, which has created 4,000 jobs, the company has said in court filings.
More than 150 American vessels have supported construction at U.S. offshore wind farms, including specialized construction ships, supply vessels and fishing boats contracted to watch for protected mammal species or do other monitoring work, according to data from the Oceantic Network, a nonprofit that advocates for offshore wind.
Construction ships have been sourced from over 30 U.S. companies, many of which are based along the Gulf, which Trump renamed the Gulf of America.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement last week that the clean energy industry “was kept afloat by taxpayer-funded subsidies in Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, forcing Americans to pay billions more for the least reliable sources of energy like wind and solar.”
Rogers said Trump’s focus on oil, gas, coal and nuclear is “driving economic growth to create new jobs across our economy.”
‘Attack on wind’
Aries Marine docks two vessels from its Gulf fleet in a marshy river in Dorchester, where they undergo maintenance and wait between work assignments.
Insect-like liftboats were invented for the offshore oil industry, but they’re just as useful for offshore wind because their decks provide a stable workplace out at sea.
The industrial ships have three massive, chimney-like legs that extend high into the air. When they reach a job site, those legs can be plunged into the sea floor, lifting the boats out of the water.
For offshore wind, the vessels are used for a range of tasks, including installing underwater cables and performing maintenance work on turbines.
When a liftboat is on its stilts alongside a wind turbine, technicians and other workers can be housed on board the ship, allowing them to walk across a gangway to their job and ensuring work can continue even in bad weather. During hurricanes and severe storms, the vessels sail to protected waters.
Liftboats are one example of the close ties between the oil and gas industry and offshore wind, which has largely relied on expertise, equipment and operators from the Gulf to build projects off the East Coast.
“It’s impossible to impact offshore wind and not hurt the oil and gas industry” because of wind projects’ reliance on offshore expertise in the Gulf, said Sam Salustro, senior vice president of policy and market affairs at the Oceantic Network.
Salustro said each project under construction pays Gulf vessel operators hundreds of millions of dollars per year to use their boats. Those same operators are now staring down a potential “collapse of the construction market.”
At Aries Marine, Ramsay is the second-generation leader at his family-run company, which has its origins in Louisiana’s offshore oil and gas sector.
Six years ago, he said the company saw an opportunity to expand its business by bidding on work for wind projects. Since then, Aries Marine has done jobs for all of the wind projects currently under construction, as well as ones that are already finished, like the Block Island wind farm off Rhode Island.
A range of vessels and hundreds of technicians have worked on the multibillion-dollar wind projects, which were cast into uncertain territory when offshore wind projects were halted in December.
John Dunderdale, the business manager at Piledrivers Local 56 — which represents construction workers in New England — said between 75 and 100 of his union’s members were laid off after the stop-work orders in December. That risked causing workers to lose their health insurance coverage.
As construction on four of the five projects has been allowed by judges to resume, many of those workers are returning to their job sites. But the gloomy outlook for future offshore wind work could lead union workers to lose their training certificates, which last for two years and are expensive to renew, Dunderdale said.
“If this administration continues to have this attack on wind, we’re going to have a gap,” he said. “It was an industry that I thought was going to be really good for this country. Obviously, they think differently.”
Echoes of BP spill
Andy Benedetto, a business representative at the Millwrights Local 1121, which represents industrial mechanics in New England, said the fate of wind projects has been “extremely deflating.”
He said trained mechanics have texted him recently asking, “What next wind project can I go out on?” he recalled. “They’re not fully understanding that there probably isn’t a next one, for the time being.”
At the shipyard in Dorchester, Ramsay said he is watching as Congress debates legislation that could make it more difficult for an administration to stop already-permitted work.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers spent recent months discussing potential changes to the nation’s permitting laws, which could involve protections for projects that are already approved. Democratic lawmakers paused those negotiations when the Trump administration issued stop-work orders to wind projects in December, and they continue to say that an agreement hinges on the administration changing course.
Ramsay compared the offshore wind pauses to a six-month moratorium imposed on offshore oil and gas drilling during the Obama administration after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. That event included the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history and killed 11 people.
Aries Marine had invested $80 million in two new boats that were delivered weeks before the BP-owned well blew out, Ramsay said, and the moratorium pushed the company to search for jobs in Mexico that paid less than contracts would have in the Gulf.
“The ability for different administrations to start and stop industries like that is really damaging to the workforce,” Ramsay said.
He said he hopes the wind industry can hang on because he likes the diversity it brings to his business.
But in the future, his company will have to review its options and decide whether there are still enough jobs to keep his ships in the Northeast. Each boat costs the company at least $3 million annually for salaries and maintenance.
“We just have to kind of look at our backlog of work and make a decision of whether or not it makes sense to stay up here,” he said. “If it doesn’t, then we’ll sail back to the Gulf.”
