FORTY-TWO ACRES of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a natural gas plant, which replaced a coal power plant that was shut down in 2014. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.

But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.

For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.

In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.

“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.

In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.

“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”

In 2022, Gov. Charlie Baker signed into law a clean energy bill that codified a goal to procure 5,600 megawatts of offshore wind by June of 2027. In 2023, the Department of Energy released an Offshore Wind Strategy to meet President Biden’s goal to deploy 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind energy by 2030 to power 10 million homes, support 77,000 jobs, and create $12 billion per year in direct private investment. In 2024, to meet the state’s ambitious climate goals, Gov. Maura Healey pursued deals with three offshore wind developers for a total of 2,678 megawatts of electricity. There are a handful of offshore wind projects off the coast of Massachusetts whose statuses range from proposed to operational — including Vineyard Wind 1, the country’s first commercial offshore wind project to begin initial operations, though it has been imperiled by a contract dispute with General Electric. Vineyard Wind 2, which is still without permits, intended to use Salem as its port.

Building commercial scale offshore wind requires tremendous amounts of labor. According to Vineyard Wind 1’s most recent annual report, the project has supported 3,725 jobs since it began. Operations and maintenance is expected to sustain approximately 80 to 100 jobs per year moving forward.

Salem and New Bedford saw an economic opportunity in the burgeoning wind industry, and the state was happy to lend support. In December of 2022, MassCEC and the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs announced $180 million in funding for ports and infrastructure projects for offshore wind in the state. That included $75 million to Salem and Crowley Wind Services — an offshore wind solutions company — to convert the coal-fired power plant and $15 million to New Bedford’s Foss Marine Terminal for the redevelopment of the former Eversource Energy/Sprague Oil power plant.

These ports would serve as landlords to the companies installing the wind turbines who would rent the terminal site for a few years at a time to facilitate the construction of their projects, and use them to a lesser degree long term for operations and maintenance. But many of the wind projects around the state are stuck in limbo, some without permits at all. Experts believe it will remain that way at least until the Trump administration leaves office.

“There has been this chilling effect on the industry,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation.

The hurdles began in January of 2025 when Trump issued an executive order halting new leases for offshore wind. In early December of 2025, a judge overturned the order but no new wind leases have been issued by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. In late December, wind companies received what became referred to as the “Christmas surprise.” Five wind projects, including three from Massachusetts, had their leases paused by the Trump administration, citing national security concerns about radar interference that can create false targets. While the court issued preliminary injunctions temporarily reversing the order, the delays took a toll on the projects. The developers for Vineyard Wind 1 said in court filings that they were losing $2.3 million per day while the operation was shut down.

There “really isn’t any pipeline anymore, because of the changes in federal policy, and which is unfortunate, because those are very large projects that would have invested a sizable amount of money into the port in New Bedford,” said New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell.

According to Salem’s Mayor Dominick Pangallo, the original Salem Offshore Wind Terminal Project was estimated to cost between $250 and $300 million. (In addition to the $75 million from MassCEC and the state, the project was supposed to receive roughly $36 million in federal grants.) The remainder would come from private funding. Salem Alliance for the Environment (SAFE), along with neighborhood associations and civic groups, formed a coalition to weigh in on the project. These advocates worked for three years to develop a community benefits agreement with Crowley Wind Services. The agreement included hiring targets for local, women, and minority residents, $400,000 in scholarships for offshore wind or maritime-related career paths, $1.25 million for additional personnel in the Harbormaster’s Department to help with the maritime operation of the terminal, and more than $3.5 million for Salem public schools and educational programs.

The Massachusetts Building Trades Union brokered an agreement to provide labor for the construction. The city spent considerable staff time working on the project.

But in August of 2025, the Department of Transportation rescinded $34 million of the $36 million in federal grant money from the project, undermining the financial viability of the plans. Crowley Wind Services declined to comment on the status of the project, but Pangallo said the absence of the grant has caused disruption and led to a loss in jobs, property tax revenues, and harbor usage fees.

“It’s not the entirety of the project cost, but it was enough to create some challenges to making the project manageable. So the city and [Mass]CEC and Crowley [are] working to try to identify ways to manage that loss of funding,” Pangallo said. “Delays to the project may also expose it to increased costs from inflation, which can be significant for a project this scale.”

Bonnie Bain, SAFE’s executive director, said that she could see where things were headed long before the grant was rescinded. But even though it was expected, it was still “a gut punch” to discover that the project was delayed and the community benefits might never be realized.

“It’s awful and demoralizing to [know] we did all that, and it was done as right as we could with the timeline we had … and the results aren’t coming,’” she said.

Labor organizations are also reeling from the chaos caused by the Trump administration. They’ve invested money to train workers on wind construction, including paying for the Global Wind Organisation (GWO) mandatory training that offers instruction on sea survival and rescue. It can cost $2,000 or more per worker and is valid for only two years.

“There is definitely a burden to get your people trained,” said Steve Barry, business manager for IBEW Local 223. “Then the hope is that they’re going to continue in this industry, which now obviously [has] a pause on it.”

Frank Callahan, president of Massachusetts Building Trades Union, said that job opportunities beyond the terminals and the wind farms have been impacted by the political climate around wind. Prysmian, the company set to build a deep-sea cable manufacturing plant at Brayton Point in Somerset, Mass., had signed a letter of intent to use union labor. The $300 million venture would have provided over 100 manufacturing jobs and produced components needed to bring electricity from the sea to land. But days before Trump took office, Prysmian walked away from the project.

The 26-acre New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal served as the marshaling place for materials, like food and fuel, that went out to the job site of Vineyard Wind 1. (The majority of turbine components flowed through New Bedford’s Marine Commerce Terminal and were prepared for installation there.) And it will continue to be the site for aspects of Vineyard Wind 1’s operations and maintenance. But the terminal has not secured tenants for future wind projects, which Saunders expected to be the majority of its business. He said he is negotiating with wind developers to revive letters of intent that have expired.

In the meantime, the terminal’s business consists of marine construction — such as bridge building and seismic work for pre-development of wind projects — as well as non-wind related shipping.

Mitchell says that because the Port of New Bedford, which consists of multiple terminals and piers, is such a successful fishing port, the slow down in the wind industry has not impacted the overall economics.

“This continues to be the top fishing port in the country. … Our efforts in offshore wind … remain about diversification,” said Mitchell.

Saunders refers to the Foss Marine Terminal as “not yet grown up” and is sticking to the belief that wind will play an increasingly important role in its future.

“We’re not walking away from offshore wind, because we think that that is a valid market,” Saunders said, adding that they have a “phase 3” plan during which they will expand the terminal’s number of active berths from 2 to 10. These additional berths are intended for offshore wind construction.

Meanwhile, Salem, MassCEC, and Crowley Wind Services are working to revise the design of their port to account for the $34 million cut in federal funding. Pangallo says that one alternative is to develop only one berth for now and add a second in a future year when the industry demand is stronger. And more funding may come yet. Lawmakers are weighing a proposal from Gov. Healey that would redirect $70 million from an unutilized offshore wind tax incentive into a MassCEC fund that could be used to support construction at the Salem port.

In an email statement to CommonWealth Beacon, Crowley officials said the company remains “dedicated to developing the site into a versatile marine logistics hub for the future” and is “continuing to work with our public and private partners on the best path forward for supporting Massachusetts and New England’s energy and economic needs.”

And, experts believe, the wind industry will be strong again.

“We think of it as a slowing down, not a stop,” said Daly of the Conservation Law Foundation. “When there is an administration in power again that acknowledges that climate change is real and that offshore wind has a huge role to play in addressing the threats from climate change … the developers will come back.”

Until then, there’s other work to do, says Bain of SAFE. She says wind isn’t the only solution to climate change, nor the only job creator. SAFE is working on job development for solar, geothermal, and micro-grid projects in Salem.

“I think the shiny object is obviously the port, but we need … electricians for solar, we need HVAC folks. There’s all kinds of clean energy pathways that are not halted right now,” said Bain. She said she is committed to working “in our little sandbox, where we have actual power.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Salem offshore wind terminal would be the second in the state. It would be the third.

The earlier version also mistakenly said that the natural gas plant in Salem was decommissioned. It is still in operation.