IT WAS THREE SHORT YEARS AGO that Massachusetts legislators enacted an ambitious package designed to boost offshore wind and other clean energy technologies.
The year was 2022. Joe Biden was in the White House, Democrats controlled the US Congress, and the economy started to emerge from its Covid slump, so officials on Beacon Hill were hopeful about the opportunity to bring home a sizable chunk of the economic bounty thought to be tied to offshore wind.
With the idea of turbines sprouting up off the coast and union workers assembling the parts necessary to deploy the technology, then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed legislation including $35 million in tax breaks for offshore wind companies to build a domestic supply chain in the Bay State.
The problem is there have been no takers.
For each of the past two years, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) ran formal solicitations offering the tax credits. For each of the past two years, MassCEC received no applications and made no awards, the agency confirmed to CommonWealth Beacon.
This latest revelation paints a picture of just how stark of a difference has emerged between Massachusetts’s offshore wind vision and the reality — even before President Trump took office and quickly cracked down on clean energy projects around the country. Since his second inauguration, the Trump administration has sought to revoke permits for offshore wind projects and rescind a designation for 3.5 million acres in federal waters that would have allowed for large-scale wind development. The uncertainty has made it difficult for wind developers and the commonwealth’s utilities to negotiate a price for wind power.
“What I blame are the supply chain disruptions that came out of the pandemic and then intensified in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” said Sen. Michael Barrett, a Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy and played a key role in crafting the 2022 climate law that authorized the tax breaks. “Those tax breaks would be working today and doing their intended work if offshore wind were a successful and ongoing thing. But everything depends on an ecosystem that is healthy in the present and is looking toward a predictable future.”
MassCEC’s solicitation included $35 million in tax credits over a five-year period for creating new permanent jobs and investing in offshore wind facilities to stimulate manufacturing and supply chain capacity in the industry.
The intent, Barrett said, was for the tax breaks to incentivize smaller businesses to engage in offshore wind research and manufacturing of component parts like sensors and cables to support the larger offshore wind developers.
But when the industry’s foundation – the big developers with leases to sites in the Atlantic –began to crack, the ensuing economic boom didn’t materialize as projected, rendering the tax breaks ineffective.
Even before the second Trump term, the offshore wind industry was reeling from a period of global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation and high interest rates that drove up costs of projects along the East Coast. Two Massachusetts offshore wind projects paid $60 million and $48 million in 2023 just to get out of previously-signed contracts in response to those economic issues.
MassCEC blamed those macroeconomic factors for the lack of uptake of the tax breaks, saying in a statement that the past two years were “challenging” for the industry and that businesses ultimately “need to be in a commercial position to make good on the financial investment and/or the new permanent employee hiring and retention” to qualify.
This June, the state unveiled lower standards a company must meet to qualify for the jobs credit. Offshore wind companies previously were required to commit to creating at least 50 net new permanent jobs in Massachusetts to be eligible for the tax break. That threshold has been lowered to just 10 net new permanent jobs in the state.
MassCEC said it plans to continue to offer the tax credits next year.
The lack of interest in these tax breaks comes as the state has struggled to attract and keep related wind projects on track, with several of the most high-profile initiatives located in environmental justice communities.
Because of the federal uncertainty, at least $100 million of the funding the state set aside for wind projects in 2022 are in doubt, according to a list of MassCEC awards.
For example, a $75 million award to Crowley Wind Services and the City of Salem to convert a former coal-fired power plant into an offshore wind port is in limbo after the Trump administration withdrew $34 million in federal money to support the project.
Salem Mayor Dominick Pangallo told CommonWealth Beacon that the city, MassCEC, and Crowley are hoping to make a decision “as quickly as possible” how best to proceed, whether that be identifying additional funding to cover the gap for the roughly $300 million project or scaling back development plans to meet the new reduced budget. The wind port may also need to temporarily serve non-offshore wind tenants given the Trump administration’s pause on permitting new wind projects, Pangallo added.
“This was a project that was going to create American jobs, American energy that was clean, reliable and renewable,” he said. “It was going to reactivate our port, which is a historic site that’s contributed to the economy of our nation for almost 400 years now. It’s incredibly frustrating to see this opportunity, this chance to create jobs, stimulate our economy and grow our American energy supply, just being allowed to sit dormant.”
The state also awarded $25 million to an Italian company to build a wind cable manufacturing facility at the Brayton Point Marine Commerce Center in Somerset, the site of an old coal-fired power plant. Biden even visited the site a few months before that award to tout the intersection of renewable energy and jobs.
“It doesn’t get much more exciting than having the president come into town to highlight the future of the industry,” recalled Casey Bowers, vice president of government relations at the Environmental League of Massachusetts, which in 2020 founded the New England for Offshore Wind coalition.
But the company withdrew its plans shortly after Trump took office.
MassCEC then notified the company, Prysmian, “that the grant was terminated,” an agency spokesperson said. That brought the agency back to the drawing board for the site as it considers options for reallocating that funding.
With Republicans in charge in Washington, federal clean energy tax credits are being phased out, and no new offshore wind projects are likely to be approved. Vineyard Wind, the state’s lone offshore wind development currently in operation, has for now been left untouched by Trump’s efforts to shut down other fully permitted wind farms.
The federal hostility on top of an already shaky landscape for offshore wind before Trump took office is butting up against state climate targets: Massachusetts is required by state law to lock in 5,600 megawatts of offshore wind by the middle of 2027. It’s also laying bare the challenges with fulfilling the job prospects and economic revitalization that Bay Staters were hoping would come along with the investment in clean energy.
“Our members were absolutely lining up, and we were taking in apprentices, and we were training people” to go into the offshore wind industry, said Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions. “A lot of young people were attracted to these careers. They wanted to be part of this exciting new industry. And they don’t know what’s going to happen right now.”
With offshore wind likely to languish further into Trump’s term, state officials are looking to pivot to other energy sources that can bring down energy costs while meeting climate commitments.
“We need to shift strategy to solar,” Barrett said. “We had an offshore wind strategy, and we want to hold that one in reserve until circumstances improve. But for now, it’s solar, and I don’t see a true blueprint for developing solar.”