When former President Joe Biden first took office, the winds were clearly blowing in the right direction for the offshore turbine industry — and the Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian Group saw an opening.
The company, expecting the new administration to finally build long hoped-for wind turbines off the coast of New England, announced plans in December 2021 for a factory in Somerset, Massachusetts. The plant would make electrical cables to connect the windmills to the town’s grid infrastructure, which had connected to New England’s largest coal-fired power station until it shut down in 2010.
Last Friday, just days before President Donald Trump returned to office and halted all new offshore wind projects with the stroke of a pen, Prysmian pulled the plug on the $300 million project, which would have created hundreds of jobs.
“The decision was not tied to any political developments,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Vowing to pursue “a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump’s executive ordersMonday paused any new permitting of offshore wind projects in federal waters and threatened lawsuits to revoke existing licenses. That dealt what analysts said was a crushing blow to the industry Prysmian’s factory hoped to serve.
But a source with direct knowledge of the Prysmian’s thinking – granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the subject publicly – told HuffPost the company had failed to secure all the permits needed to move forward with the project.
The factory’s demise highlights the headwinds the offshore turbine industry faced even during the Biden administration, which directed unprecedented public support toward a clean-energy sector designed to help the densely populated American Northeast wean off fossil fuels.
“We’re going to make sure the ocean is open for the clean energy of our future and everything we can do to give a green light to wind power on the Atlantic coast, where my predecessor’s actions only created confusion,” Biden said in a speechat the cable factory site in 2022.
Former President Joe Biden addresses the crowd and gathered media at the closed Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Massachusetts, United States on July 20, 2022. Biden spoke about climate change and declared he would use his powers soon to tackle climate change. The closed station will soon be used in a wind power project.
That same year, Prysmian faced pushback.Neighbors complained about noise from construction trucks and dust from the scrapyard that occupied much of the property the Milan-based company sought to take over.
By October 2023, the offshore wind industry had started showing bigger problems. That’s when the Danish energy giant Ørsted abandoned a major offshore wind project in the waters off New Jersey, as inflation drove up the construction costs.
At a time when states like Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York were shuttering old nuclear power stations, advocates of offshore wind initially billed the skyscraper-sized seaward turbines as a clean alternative to fossil fuels that came at a lower price tag than new reactors. Before long, however, estimates put the cost of offshore wind farms in league with — or even higher than — the price of atomic energy. That’s despite the fact that wind power lacks some of nuclear’s benefits, such as 24/7 energy output and greater political support from Republicans.
Biden’s landmark climate-infrastructure laws earmarked hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy — everything from solar panel factories to electric vehicle charging stations to uranium-enrichment plants to vast new networks of power lines. But decades-old permitting processes, designed before climate change and growing electricity demand from air conditioning and data centers, mired energy projects in years-long queues, as inflation drove up the costs of materials and higher interest rates made delays on paying back borrowed money even more expensive.
In the final year of Biden’s presidency, Democrats in the Senate championed a bipartisan permitting reform deal aimed at speeding up federal approvals. The legislation split Democrats’ razor-thin majority.
Brokered by former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), two fossil fuel stalwarts, the bill included provisions to boost fossil fuel infrastructure, such as gas pipelines.
Expert analyses repeatedly showed the benefits of rapidly building out clean energy outweighedthese measures, but many progressives sided with environmentalists who opposed the legislation, calling it a “dirty deal.”
By the time former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sought to pass the legislation during the lame-duck session after the November election, Republicans, set to take full control of Congress in 2025, saw no reason to compromise.
With different electoral outcomes, projects like Prysmian’s factory — located at the site of the defunct Brayton Point Power Plant, once New England’s largest coal-fired station — might have seen enough demand from new offshore projects to justify the investment. But between an indefinite ban on new turbines and the possibility that the Department of Justice may sue to stop construction on current projects, there’s far less need for cables.
Calling Prysmian’s decision “disappointing and discouraging,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) said Trump’s “unraveled that promise of good jobs by threatening a moratorium on offshore wind,” creating too much risk for companies’ investments.
His statement echoed market analysts’ assessments.
“The Trump administration’s anti-wind stance and new executive order targeting new developments bring significant uncertainty to the future growth prospects of US offshore wind,” Oliver Metcalfe, the head of wind research at the energy consultancy BloombergNEF, said by email. “This makes it more difficult for component manufacturers to justify building new facilities in the US and means that the sector will have to rely on the European offshore wind supply chain for longer.”
Prysmian has a backlog of orders in Europe, where the war in Ukraine is driving billions of dollars of investments in offshore wind. European countries have been eager to build new interconnection projects and rewire the continent’s grid to integrate more renewables and end their reliance on Russian gas imports. That demand shows little sign of easing, particularly amid new security concerns, as Chinese vessels have repeatedly cut undersea cables connecting European members of the NATO alliance.
The Italian company still plans to make investments in the U.S. But that offers little reprieve for Somerset, which has yet to recover the jobs lost when two power plants in the town shut down. The Prysmian factory promised anywhere from 100 to 200 jobs, with hundreds more temporary gigs in construction, and upward of $14 million per year in tax revenue, Jamison Souza, the chair of the Somerset Select Board, told the Fall River Herald News. (Souza did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.)
“This brings us back to the drawing board. It’s a major blow,” Souza said in another interview with the nonprofit CommonWealth Beacon. “We’re scraping. We’re down to bare bones.”
