Trump’s Vendetta Against Wind is Gutting Jobs and Raising Prices.
ROLLING STONE
Trump’s Vendetta Against Wind Is Gutting Jobs and Raising Prices
President Donald Trump’s bizarre war on offshore wind is getting worse — and it’s screwing workers and anyone who uses electricity. In the past year, Trump’s policies have resulted in the loss of more than half of the planned power set to come from offshore wind, according to a new report by the Energy Industries Council released last week. People all across the country are facing relentlessly skyrocketing energy prices, with average electricity bills in July up 9.5 percent from just one year ago. Rising energy costs were a key issue influencing voters in elections this month and are expected to again play an outsized role in the crucial 2026 midterms.
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.
“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.
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.”