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offshore wind could bring,” she says. “It
was just an opportunity that we wanted
to be ready for.”
Europe, where offshore wind is a
long-established industry, may also
offer an ideal training ground for U.S.
workers. Orsted, a Danish offshore-wind
giant, is bringing more than a dozen
American workers to train at its Euro-
pean sites for months at a time. The idea,
says Orsted’s head of North America
operations Mikkel Maehlisen, is to
create an elite group of workers who
can in turn train more Americans as
the company’s U.S. projects—like a
planned 700- megawatt wind farm off
Rhode Island—get under way.
Despite this flurry of training in-
vestment, some U.S. labor leaders
worry that as the country decarbon-
izes, an expansion of offshore wind
won’t provide as many jobs as its
proponents hope, especially com-
pared with the expected loss of labor-
intensive fossil- fuel power-plant proj-
ects. David Langlais, business manager
of Ironworkers Local 37 in Rhode
Island, is particularly concerned about
the fact that many offshore-wind-
related jobs come from manufactur-
ing turbine components—an industry
based largely in Europe—rather than
erecting and maintaining such equip-
ment offshore. “There’ll be a tremen-
dous amount of hours that the Ameri-
can workforce will lose out on,” he says.
Langlais wants offshore- wind man-
ufacturers like GE, which is supplying
turbines to the Vineyard Wind project
and makes many of its components in
France, to produce turbines and simi-
lar gear domestically—a goal offshore-
wind developers say they support. Or-
sted, for instance, has tapped Local 37
iron workers to help erect a huge steel
structure at the port in Providence, R.I.,
to be used to manufacture bases for the
company’s offshore turbines. And de-
spite his reservations about offshore
wind, Langlais says his union is com-
mitted to the green-energy transition.
“I’m not a scientist, but clearly we’re
getting more hurricanes, we’re getting
worse storms, it’s getting warmer,”Langlais says. “There’s obviously some-
thing to this climate change, and it has
to do with carbon emissions. So we have
to do the right thing.”
Back on Martha’s Vineyard, Miles
Brucculeri, 44, is studying hard de-
spite his doubts about future employ-
ment. He’s worked as a surfing instruc-
tor for the past two decades but isn’t sure
how much longer he’ll be able to swim
the five daily miles such work requires,
and he’s been frustrated by a lack of local
work opportunities with health benefits
during the long off-season. “You’re ei-
ther serving rich people in this kind of
fake, rich-people economy, or there’s not
much out here,” he says. At the moment,
Brucculeri is 11 months into Bristol
Community College’s two-year offshore-
wind education course. By the time he
finishes, Vineyard Wind’s offshore tur-
bines will still be at least six months
from producing power. Even after they
go online, there’s no guarantee he’ll be
hired as a technician. But in order for
offshore wind to take off in the U.S. as
it has elsewhere in the world, more peo-
ple like him will have to take the plunge.
“The opportunity came up, so I took it,”
Brucculeri says. “I don’t know where it’s
gonna lead.” △
Workers preparing to erect new
offshore wind farms along the U.S.
East Coast in the coming years
are taught how to do their jobs
at sea and trained in emergency
survival techniques