Posted on October 20, 2025
Under the Trump administration, there’s been a relentless effort to halt wind projects that have already been researched, financed and permitted.
When I think of the changes I’ve seen in New Bedford this last quarter century, none has stirred me to greater hope or greater emotion than the site of the massive wind turbine components at the South Terminal.
Looming like a shiny rocket launch pad over the Acushnet River, the Vineyard Wind staging area has changed the skyline of the city.
And it’s not just the New Bedford skyline that has been changed.
Anyone who has seen the strapping barges that carry the enormous turbine parts — the tower stages, the rotor blades and the nacelles (engine housing) — can’t help but be awed by just how impressive these big energy machines are. Not to mention the human technology, seamanship and imagination that has transported them across the ocean.
This is industry on a size we have never seen in this small port.
The Fairhaven side of the river is particularly good for viewing the turbine comings and goings. Never have I been over there when enormously powerful tugboats were pushing the humongous turbine-laden barges up and down that river, that I haven’t stopped whatever I was doing to watch them pass. How do they get through that narrow entrance to the hurricane barrier? How has man achieved this awe-inspiring business!
The hope, of course, is that the wind turbine industry can be a big part of the city’s future economy and also a big part of the effort to put a dent in the rapidly warming climate. I feel strongly it will, but I have friends who regularly rattle off the reasons it won’t.
I know that much of the city’s fishing fleet fear greatly that this wind-at-sea business will adversely affect the way our fishermen travel to their fishing grounds, and even the survival of some of the species they fish for. It’s a legitimate, if so far unproven, concern. That has to be weighed, however, against the fact that a good number of other local fishermen are actually working for the wind industry on security and scouting voyages. And that work has saved them economically from our ongoing era of imponderable federal restrictions that have suffocated parts of the Northeast fishery.
Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments that turbines use more fossil fuel than they generate. I’m not sure that’s completely true; certainly it’s not true in the long run. But I’ve heard the arguments. I wonder sometimes about the folks making these talking points and whether they feel the same way about the oil derricks in the Gulf of Mexico or the massive gas pipelines that criss-cross the belly of our nation, and their contributions to climate warming.
Yes, there is government support for the turbines. And yes, there is government support for the fossil fuel and fishing industries. Not enough for the fishing industry, if you ask me, compared to what the Midwestern farmers receive.
But I am a believer in science, and the overwhelming consensus of the scientists is that the climate is drastically and rapidly warming. And if we don’t do something about it, we risk our own peril as a species. I’m writing this column, after all, on an 80-degree October day in New England.
Wind turbine tower stages loom over the South Terminal in New Bedford. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light
Will New Bedford’s wind turbine skyline be gone soon?
A wind turbine tower stage sits horizontally off MacArthur Drive in the South End of New Bedford. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light
Under the directives of the current presidential administration, there’s been a relentless effort to halt wind projects that have already been researched, financed and permitted. Some of the fishing interests make plausible arguments that the birth of such an intrusive industry on the high seas should proceed more slowly. And there’s some merit to that — we don’t know what we don’t know about the future of the fishery and wind existing together. The question, however, is whether global warming gives us time to proceed slowly and methodically. With the Greenland ice pack dropping into the North Atlantic every year, it does seem like it should be all hands on deck for alternative energy at this stage of the heating atmosphere.
It’s all a bit complicated.
Some of the same folks who decry New Bedford taking part in the wind staging and maintenance industries seem like they’d be the first to cry foul if New Bedford had left the burgeoning industry to develop in nearby Rhode Island and Salem and Long Island.
It’s all business interests and politics, one way or the other, it seems.
The statue of Prince Henry the Navigator looks out on the Vineyard Wind staging in New Bedford from Popes Island. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light
I’ve learned, of course, like so many of us have, not to glibly debate climate change with those who disagree with me. Particularly if we are friends.
Both sides are more than certain that the facts and reason back them up. I’m certainly convinced that one side is wrong, but the subject — like so many others that have polluted our politics these days — has become more an invitation to bitter argument rather than to reasoned discussion. Even a guy like me, who makes his living analyzing politics, has learned to keep his mouth shut sometimes.
So this year the Trump administration on Day 1 put a stop to new turbine farms — leases, permits, loans, the whole shebang.
It didn’t stop there. In April, the administration first halted New York’s Empire Wind, and then reinstated it, after a reported deal with the state accepting additional natural gas pipeline capacity.
In August, the Interior Department astonishingly ordered a halt to work on the already 80% complete Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The federal department cited vague national security concerns and a District of Columbia district court has since reversed the order. At least for now.
This offshore wind energy effort, as with so many others, has been delayed as the court cases and regulatory actions play out.
Early in the Vineyard Wind staging process in New Bedford, a cross-ocean barge towed wind turbine tower stages into New Bedford. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light
In the meantime, the number of turbine components at the South Terminal has decreased. The Light’s intrepid reporter Anastasia Lennon informed us that Vineyard Wind, the first turbine project to lease the South Terminal, is almost completed. There are just 10 more barge shipments to go.
I keep watching that New Bedford skyline. Will it soon return to an empty staging ground, as it was for the first decade after it was built? Will this monument to renewable energy soon be over?
If it is, will anyone ever want to construct ocean wind turbines in America again?
