Welders are hard at work at the Paulsboro Marine Terminal, four years after New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy announced a $250 million investment from offshore wind energy companies in a new manufacturing facility. But instead of putting together massive monopiles to prop up wind turbines off the Jersey Shore, they’re taking them apart to sell for scrap.
In 2023, Ørsted, a Danish wind developer, announced it was pulling out of two planned wind projects that would have provided about 2,200 megawatts of energy to New Jersey. Earlier this year, Shell announced it was canceling a $1 billion investment in another offshore wind project in the state. A few days later, Murphy announced that his administration wouldn’t put any more state money into offshore wind.
It was a steep fall for the Democrat’s once-ambitious clean energy plans. Murphy took office in 2018 with hopes of making New Jersey the center of offshore wind development on the East Coast. He set a goal of providing 3,500 megawatts of wind power by 2030, later expanding it to 11,000 megawatts by 2040 — as much electricity as all of the state’s natural gas power plants combined. Offshore wind was central to his administration’s climate goal of generating 100 percent clean energy by 2050.
But problems have kept accumulating for the offshore wind industry in the last few years. Long a critic of windmills, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day back in office pausing all wind leasing on the continental shelf. Shell cited rising costs and delays in announcing its decision to pull out of the Atlantic Shores project in January. But a company spokesperson added, “Naturally we also take regulatory context into consideration.”
New Jersey’s wind champions have watched with dismay. “You can’t blame the people investing money for standing back when the president of the United States says he’s bringing the full weight of the federal government to see that these things never happen,” says New Jersey state Sen. John Burzichelli, a Democrat who has worked to promote wind-industry development for years.
Trump’s open antipathy to wind energy was only the final straw. Commercial offshore wind is essentially untested in the U.S., with just a few clusters of wind turbines currently generating power off the coasts of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island. It’s often noted that wind itself is a free and renewable power resource, but offshore wind farms are capital-intensive, with long permitting timelines and lots of upfront investment required.
In New Jersey, the two most promising projects — Ocean Wind, developed by Ørsted, and Atlantic Shores, developed by Shell and EDF Renewables — were slowed down by some fairly predictable factors. Coastal residents who didn’t want turbines obstructing their sea views, and who claimed that offshore wind activity was responsible for a rash of whale deaths off the Jersey Shore, filed a series of lawsuits against the projects. Inflation and supply chain disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic slowed them down even more. An Ørsted executive said last year that delays in global production of component parts, including foundations, turbines and vessels, created too much risk in the Ocean Wind project and led the company to drop its plans.
Although the New Jersey projects have hit the skids, others are moving ahead. Dominion Energy says that it’s on track to complete a massive wind farm 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach next year. Last summer, Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey celebrated the groundbreaking for a new offshore wind terminal in Salem, where turbine components will be delivered and pre-assembled.
Many proponents are still optimistic about the industry’s long-term prospects. “These projects take time,” says Kelt Wilska, the offshore wind director for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. “Four years is nothing in terms of the timeline of a project getting built. Permitting itself can take 10 years. I’m not concerned about a four-year blip in the timeline.”
Wind backers are as likely to cite the jobs associated with the industry as they are the climate benefits it could provide. Burzichelli, a former mayor of Paulsboro, sponsored the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act in 2010. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, appeared with him at the Paulsboro Marine Terminal to sign it into law. Murphy has cited “tens of thousands of jobs” that the wind industry could provide to New Jersey. Some of those benefits had started to accrue in Paulsboro with the development of the monopile manufacturing facility at the marine terminal.
The town invested millions in infrastructure to support the project, including a new road providing access over a creek to the site. It built its financial plans on lease payments from the manufacturing company that occupied the site. But it never saw any major residual economic benefits before the operation was abandoned. “The real promise of jobs lies in the promise of manufacturing facilities,” Burzichelli says.
Clean-energy groups are struggling to develop a strategic response to Trump’s vow to block all future projects. RMI, a clean-energy think tank, is “still in the process of assessing and evaluating the impact of evolving U.S. policy,” according to a spokesperson. The American Clean Power Association, an industry group, declined an interview request but released a statement in response to Trump’s order that said, “The possibility that the federal government could seek to actively oppose energy production by American companies on private land is at odds with our nation’s character as well as our national interests.”
Gov. Murphy, who will leave office next year, signaled ongoing support for wind power even as he backed the state utility commission’s decision in early February to cancel its fourth solicitation for new projects. “The offshore wind industry is currently facing significant challenges, and now is the time for patience and prudence,” he said.
In the meantime, Paulsboro is living with the unfulfilled promises of the clean-energy transition. For decades, an oil refinery has been one of the biggest employers in town. Local politicians have maintained their support for the oil industry even as they’ve worked to push for investments in renewable energy. The offshore wind boom was supposed to be a moment of industrial revival for Paulsboro, which lost a quarter of its population in the last half-century. Rite Aid and CVS recently closed the town’s only remaining pharmacies.
Paulsboro Mayor John Giovannitti, a principal at the local high school, says he still thinks manufacturing for the wind industry could come back to the town. But he wants to see manufacturing jobs at the marine terminal either way. “How nice would it be for somebody else to come here and say, ‘Guess what, it took me to get this port off the ground and really thriving’?” he says. “I’m OK with that. I don’t need the credit. I want the results.”
