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CLIMATE
As mAny of new englAnd’s industriAl cities
fell into decline in recent decades, the wealthier res-
idents of Martha’s Vineyard, a regional center of af-
fluence and privilege, have gotten richer, building
and rebuilding beachfront megamansions. But their
good fortune has hardly benefited everyone on the
island, where economic inequality has run rampant.
For Michael Friedman, a 55-year-old IT engineer, ris-
ing prices driven by rich residents’ expanding wealth
have made it harder to stay and raise his family on the
tree-covered Massachusetts island where he grew up.
“What can you say?” he says, driving past the Obama
family’s Vineyard property in late October. “We’ll try
to make a go of it.”
Now, 15 miles off the island’s coast, a new green-
energy project is getting under way that many hope
will begin to spread the wealth. In a matter of months,
workers will begin erecting 837-ft.-tall wind turbines
for Vineyard Wind, the country’s first commercial-
scale offshore wind farm. When fully operational,
the plant will generate 800 megawatts of electricity,
enough to power 400,000 homes. More than a dozen
other East Coast offshore wind projects are awaiting
government approval, and the plans portend an en-
tirely new clean-energy industry—with thousands of
new, high-paying jobs to go along with it.
But there’s a catch: hardly any U.S. workers have
experience building and operating offshore turbines.
Community organizations, unions and colleges are
now filling that gap, launching training programs in
a broad effort to create a new American offshore wind
workforce. For organizations that have plowed con-
siderable time and money into education programs
OffshorecomesonlineWorkers from New Jersey to
Massachusetts are training to build
the oceanic wind farms of the futureBy Alejandro de la Garza