Transcript: Windfall, Part 4: Port of Departure
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
SAM EVANS-BROWN: So could you just speak to that microphone for a second? Let me hear how it sounds.
ZIVEN DRAKE: Here I go. Here I go. Here we go again, girls. What's my weakness, men? OK, then. Chillin, chillin. Mindin’ business. I looked around and I couldn't believe this. I swear. I stared —
SAM EVANS-BROWN: That was funny. What is that?
ZIVEN DRAKE: Shoop! Salt n’ Peppa.
Annie Ropeik: This person, with the absolutely fearless mic check, is Ziven Drake.
ZIVEN DRAKE: My name is Ziven Drake. I'm a member of Local Union 56: pile drivers and commercial divers of Boston. I am also a training coordinator for the North Atlantic States Carpenters Training Fund.
Sam Evans-Brown: We talked last fall, just before the beginning of the holiday COVID spike. We met up in a state park, but it was pouring rain, so we hid under a pavilion.
Annie Ropeik: Ziven and around three dozen other pile drivers were the very first American workers to be trained and certified to work on offshore wind projects. The union put the training together with the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the wind industry… to get ready for what’s coming.
ZIVEN DRAKE: They put us in survival suits and put us out in Buzzards Bay. I think it was like twenty degrees, wind was whipping... beautiful sunny day. But man, it was cold.
[Music and SFX swell]
Annie Ropeik: The fact that she was one of the *very* first Americans to prepare herself for work in a brand new industry is perhaps unsurprising.
ZIVEN DRAKE: I was always the only girl in a room full of boys, I was always the only female that played sports with all the guys. Most notably, there were no female hockey teams growing up.
[hockey slide SFX]
Annie Ropeik: At the age of 25, she became an air national guard mechanic.
ZIVEN DRAKE: I again, I was one of the only females on the flight line. Jets coming down, jet blast, air intakes, you name it. It's just a very dynamic, stressful work environment.
[flight line SFX]
Sam Evans-Brown: After that job wrapped up, she was kinda bored again, looking around...
ZIVEN DRAKE: So long story short, I was looking into the trades and I found commercial diving. actually I ended up enrolling in Dive School.
Sam Evans-Brown: She trained to become a union diver. An underwater construction worker.
Annie Ropeik: They work on docks and bridge pilings. Diving with radiation protection in the spent fuel tanks of nuclear reactors. It seems pretty much perfectly suited to Ziven’s personality.
ZIVEN DRAKE: Getting into the water, I'm 110 pounds with a thirty pound helmet, probably depending on the task, wearing thirty pounds of weight plus wetsuit, all the other hoses, attachment tools, all of it. So it's definitely not for the faint of heart. And people took one look at me and they're like, what are you doing here? I'll show you what I'm here to do. Kick ass.[1] [2]
Annie Ropeik: The work isn’t always glamorous. For instance, she once had to do a dive to repair a wastewater treatment plant… diving into sewage
[Music]
ZIVEN DRAKE: It's exactly what you're picturing. Just tampon applicators and turds everywhere, used condoms.
SAM EVANS-BROWN: But you get a paycheck
ZIVEN DRAKE: You do get a paycheck and a healthy paycheck at that. Back to why did I look into the trades to begin with? I make more money here, doing now what I do than I ever did with my my degree.
Sam Evans-Brown: Ziven Drake is with the Pile Drivers union. Pile driving: as in pounding foundations into the earth.
Annie Ropeik: When the first giant offshore wind turbines start to go up off the coast of Massachusetts, they will stand atop steel tubes that Ziven and her union brethren buried in the sand of the continental shelf.
[Music Fades]
SAM EVANS-BROWN: So, offshore wind. How important is it that that you have the prospect of an industry like offshore wind on the horizon that's going to have, you know, a couple of thousand structures out in the ocean?
ZIVEN DRAKE: It's huge. It's an opportunity. It's so it's not just the installation of these turbines either. It's the the maintenance of them for the life, the life of the turbine. Offshore wind provides another another avenue by which myself and my members can continue to put food on the table for the duration of our 30 plus years.
[Music out]
Sam Evans-Brown: From New Hampshire Public Radio, this is Windfall, a special series from Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown
Annie Ropeik: And I’m Annie Ropeik.
Annie Ropeik: There is a queue of around 2,000 wind turbines that energy companies want to build off the East Coast in just the next ten years. Two thousand, very complex structures, each as tall as skyscrapers, built in the OCEAN!!
And there are some big promises coming from the people who back this industry -- promises about tons of new jobs that will transform lives and communities.
DANA REBEIRO: Those kids right there, like, they could have a future in wind. There's an open door for them if if they choose to go this route.
On this episode, we ask: can they keep those promises?
[Theme Music]
Annie Ropeik: Ever since Joe Biden launched his bid for the White House, he’s been hitting a message that Democrats have been trying to sell to the public for years.
SFX: APPLAUSE COMING UP
JOE BIDEN: When I think climate change I think jobs.
That’s President Biden at his first joint address to Congress back in April. The message is that fighting climate change doesn’t have to be a job killer or a money pit.
Just the opposite - it’s an economic *opportunity*. A way to create new, homegrown industries. In short, jobs, jobs, jobs.
JOE BIDEN: There’s no reason why wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing. No reason.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons why that will be easier said than done. We’re going to get into those caveats.
But first, let’s unpack what puts a place in the running to become a hub of this industry.
Here’s our first safe bet. The cities with the most to gain from the coming American offshore wind boom will be port cities. … Specifically, cities with industrial ports — where big cargo ships can come in and out easily. Ports with deep water, room for massive, highly specialized construction ships.
Sam Evans-Brown: New London, Connecticut. New Bedford, Massachusetts, Quonset Point, Rhode Island, Port Jefferson, New York. All of these have been or are being considered as staging ports for offshore wind, but if none of them are places you’ve particularly heard of, there’s a reason.
Annie Ropeik: It’s because a successful wind port needs something else too: it needs to be down on its luck.
Sam Evans-Brown: It needs empty space on the waterfront… vacant lots… ready to turn into the specialized facilities the wind industry needs.
So, you could imagine: it’s an opportunity. A bit like when sports teams offer to come to a new city… for the right price. Cities fall over themselves to sweeten the pot.
[gentle mux sting]
Annie Ropeik: So -- let’s say the whole U.S. offshore wind industry landed in just one rusty American port? What would that look like?
JESPER BANK: we really had idled areas in the port. People were kind of out of job... We had a rough period of 10, 10 years, I would say.
Sam Evans-Brown: This is Jesper Bank, and he’s the Commercial Manager for the Port of Esbjerg, in Denmark, on the North Sea. And if there is an offshore wind capital of Europe -- it’s his port.
Over the past 20 years, there were about five and half thousand offshore wind turbines connected to the European grid. About three quarters of those turbines came through Esbjerg in some form or another.
JESPER BANK: So we have been in the game from the beginning and that’s only 25 years ago right?
[mux]
Annie Ropeik: Prior to all that, Esbjerg had been through a boom and bust cycle. Fishing was huge, then collapsed. Oil and gas came in -- but didn’t exactly replace all the fishing jobs that were lost.
It’s a familiar story for ports up and down the East Coast of the U.S. — prolonged deindustrialization -- then job losses. Infrastructure sitting idle. Rusting.
Sam Evans-Brown: Esbjerg had empty space on its waterfront — empty piers, empty buildings — AND it was close to some very windy parts of the ocean.
Long story short -- twenty years ago -- no wind jobs in Esbjerg. Today, there are more than 4,000.
Big growth -- real fast.
JESPER BANK: I've been following the U.S. market obviously for some time. And I think you will go through the same development as we have done in and around the North Sea. But what we have done in 20 years, you will do in eight.
MUSIC
Sam Evans-Brown: That’s exactly what the Biden Administration is hoping for.
The White House estimates offshore wind giants could spend $12 billion a year, each year, over the next decade. By way of comparison — in 2019 the value of all of the seafood caught in the entire United States was half that figure.
Annie Ropeik: The Biden admin is promising 44,000 wind jobs by 2030. And politicians - governors and mayors - want to to bring those shiny new wind jobs home.
Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia have pledged to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to expand ports to host this new industry - meaning, mainly, storing construction materials, housing work crews, and launching the ships that will build and maintain the wind turbines at sea.
For now -- this is all very speculative because most of the wind farms in the pipeline haven’t been given a construction permit yet.
But we CAN take a closer look at the only offshore wind project the Biden Administration HAS approved. Vineyard Wind.
Sam Evans-Brown: We interviewed Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pederson three times for this series. The last time Senior Producer Jack Rodolico and I met at his office in Boston. On the table between us was a tiny replica of the 62 massive GE turbines they’d be installing out on the continental shelf. The little rotor spun and everything.
It was a useful little prop because we wanted him to walk us through this question: how DO you build one of these things, and who will do that work?
Lars Pederson: So right now we're just clearing trees on the edge of a parking lot. So it's not it's not the glorious launch of U.S. offshore wind that you might have hoped for.
It’ll take Lars’ company three summers to build the wind farm. Year One has already started - clearing trees, building substations. All on land.
Annie Ropeik: Year Two, Summer 2022. Just one thing will happen then. They’ll lay the cable - connecting the power grid onshore to the place where the wind farm will be built at sea. It’ll take four months just to do that. Picture a HUGE ship with the biggest spool of cable you’ve ever seen.
Jack Rodolico: Four months to lay a cable that's how long?
Lars Pederson: It's 35 miles.
A 35-mile-long cable, buried under the sand, and covered with rubble to protect it.
Sam Evans-Brown: Year Three, Summer 2023. That’s when the actual wind farm in the ocean happens. It’ll be really busy out there.
Lars Pederson: At one point in time, in ‘23, you will have foundations being installed, cables being laid, turbines being installed, being commissioned, and then we work through the 62 turbines. And in a pretty quick sequence, hopefully.
This third year is also when things will be very busy back at the port-city that hosts the project. The turbine components will be laid out in what looks like a massive empty lot, but is actually a highly engineered, massive empty lot… reinforced to handle heavy weights and big cranes.
[mux post to turn to caveats]
Annie Ropeik: So -- it all seems like a lot of work for Americans? But here come the caveats.
Lars says some of the most stable employment in the wind industry is manufacturing - building the turbine components.
Lars Pederson: So actually the most jobs are created in the manufacturing. That's the most labor intensive. It's a manual process. Laying the fibers is almost like an art form.
Vineyard Wind will install the world’s most powerful turbines... which are made — in France.
So it looks like American workers won’t do any of the primary manufacturing for America's first major offshore wind farm. That's a big caveat. And here’s another one. Look at the construction… Americans know how to do the work on land. But the work at sea… that’s where our labor force falls short. For now.
Sam Evans-Brown: In the U.S. we’ve installed a grand total of seven offshore wind turbines… Americans have very little experience with those jobs on the water. So they won’t be in charge there. Not yet.
Lars Pederson: It's almost like an apprenticeship system. So in order to get to the supervisor level, you have had to do projects at a lower level and so on. So since this is the first project in the U.S., you cannot sort of fully Americanize the workforce.
Music
Annie Ropeik: For the U.S., starting an offshore wind industry later than Europe means buying parts from European factories. Getting trained by European workers. There will be years of projects in our future — where something like half of the benefit will go overseas.
And nothing does more to illustrate how divided this work will be than this one particular construction boat. ]
Annie Ropeik: It’s called a jack-up barge.
MUSIC IN
Sam Evans-Brown: A jack-up barge is a MASSIVE ship that LIFTS ITSELF OUT OF THE OCEAN. The WHOLE BOAT gets jacked-up -- 100 feet above the water.
Lars Pederson: It's basically a very, very advanced barge with a very advanced crane. It has four or six legs, depending on which it is, which side it is. It lowers those legs down to the seabed and then like an elevator, lift itself out of the water.
Annie Ropeik: To assemble an offshore wind turbine, you need a crane as tall as the Eiffel tower. The crane sits on a barge out at sea and delicately lifts huge components — blades longer than 747s — and PRECISELY puts them in place.
That’s not easy -- because the ocean is moving under the barge. So the barge has to be still. It has to come out of the water.
A jack-up barge does this with huge towers - legs - around its sides. Those towers are up in the air while the boat moves to the ocean construction site. Once there, it sinks those legs into the water, plants its feet on the stable sea floor, lifting the barge platform up. This gives the crane on the barge a steady surface from which to do its work.
If you’re having trouble picturing this… google it. You will not be sorry.
So the U.S. has some jack-up barges, also known as liftboats. A lot of them work on oil and gas drilling sites. But none are big enough to build offshore wind turbines. So Vineyard Wind will need to bring in a European jack-up barge instead.
And this is a problem… because of a World War 1-era law called the Jones Act. It basically means boats that carry goods between American ports have to be American-owned, flagged and crewed.
So the European jack-up vessel will be allowed to LIFT the turbine components, and install them. It would normally carry those parts too… but not in the States. Here, an American vessel will have to carry the parts out to the European liftboat instead.
So for Vineyard Wind, two extremely expensive boats will have to do the job of just one.
Annie Ropeik: It’s like a bucket brigade. A very expensive bucket brigade.
Lars Pederson: You would actually not put them on the boat. You can't do that. So you can use the crane of the big boat to put the pieces together.
Jack Rodolico: What are you. I do not fully appreciate the complete You. Where's that boat? While the first boat to leave in the dock is just sitting out there waiting.
Lars Pederson: ...They are quite expensive boats to have sit... waiting. Normally. You don't do that. They carry their own goods
Jack Rodolico: Normally when you're not in America, when you mean normal.
Lars Pederson: America. Yes.
Sam Evans-Brown: That will change. An American company has announced it will spend a half a billion dollars to build the first American jack-up vessel big enough to install massive new offshore turbines that are now being built, but it won’t be finished until 2023. It’ll be called the Charybdis.
Annie Ropeik: Which, can I just say as our resident classics major, the mythical whirlpool monster from Homer’s Odyssey? Metal name for a boat.
[Music]
Annie Ropeik: So that’s Vineyard Wind - it’ll create about 400 local jobs during construction. After that, to maintain the wind farm - run the power plant, as it were? Far fewer jobs, for the 30-year lifespan of this one project.
Sam Evans-Brown: And so the communities hoping to benefit from all this construction and long-term maintenance -- they need a pipeline of projects — a daisy chain keeping their wharfs busy — in order for this boom to really boom.
JESPER BANK: this is this is a tough industry. This is not a golden industry.
Sam Evans-Brown: There again is Jesper Bank, the manager of the port of Esbjerg… the offshore wind capital of Europe. It’s a city that’s kind of the best case scenario. It was the first port to build an offshore wind farm in Europe, and then it became a funnel for most of the offshore wind farms after that.
And even still -- it’s not so much boom and bust as … boom and … lull.
JESPER BANK: this is still a project industry. You'll be very busy for 18 months and then there will be a period of two years where you have nothing. And then there will come a new project.
Annie Ropeik: Until all the projects in the U.S. pipeline are approved -- IF they’re all approved -- we won’t know which American ports might wind up looking like Esbjerg -- or mini-Esbjergs.
One thing we can say for certain is that the first project in line — Vineyard Wind — has picked its home base. After the break, that’s where we’ll take you.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<MIDROLL>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sam Evans-Brown: Welcome back to Windfall, I’m Sam Evans-Brown
Annie Ropeik: And I’m Annie Ropeik.
If we agree that offshore wind WILL create jobs… sooner or later, in one American city or another… our next question is one of equity.
Because the offshore wind industry is starting out with a uniquely blank slate. At a time when inequality in America is so clearly documented -- and protested. AND ... when the President himself seems ready to tie racial justice to economic policy, and energy policy.
And right now, in Massachusetts, pressure is mounting to build an offshore wind industry that narrows the racial wealth gap. Civil rights advocates like the NAACP are making direct pitches to wind companies, imploring them to create an industry that is equitable from the get-go.
So we wanted to see what that equity might look like in one place in particular. New Bedford, Massachusetts will host construction of Vineyard Wind - which means it’s the city that will launch the American offshore wind industry.
JACK RODOLICO Ok, where's the first stop?
So that’s where we sent our senior producer Jack Rodolico. He takes it from here.
DANA REBEIRO: We're going to... let's let's go down. We're going to eventually end up on the pier where my great grandmother and Andreza Silva stepped off when she came to New Bedford from Cape Verde.
New Bedford is in southern Massachusetts, between Rhode Island and Cape Cod. And I went to New Bedford with essentially one, highly speculative question in mind.
The question: If Vineyard Wind is going to be a windfall to this city, what are the odds that it’s gonna benefit some of the people who have been most marginalized in this city - its Black residents?
And I brought that question to one person to speculate on: Dana Rebiero. Because she seems to embody so much about where this city has been and where it might be going.
Dana Rebeiro was born and raised in New Bedford, and has a history of public service here. Now she does community outreach work for Vineyard Wind. Also she’s a great tour guide.
DANA REBEIRO: So this is Rose Alley. So the whalers would -- the whales would be killed and then they dragged them up. So this alley smelled like blood a lot. Dried blood. So there used to be houses on both sides and women planted roses to cover the smell.
JACK RODOLICO: Really?
DANA REBEIRO: So, it's still called Rose Alley.
JACK RODOLICO: That’s a lot prettier than Dead Whale Alley.
DANA REBEIRO: Exactly. We’re gonna go down this way.
MUSIC UP
On just about every other block, Dana says “hi” to someone. Cops standing at a construction site. [Hey guys.] A guy on a corner, downtown. [Hey you, how are you?] She pops into a restaurant. [Hey, how are you?] She hustles everywhere. People notice her: she’s wearing this bright orange dress, and her heels click on the cement and cobblestones.
There’s history everywhere -- it was the capital of American whaling in the colonial days. Moby Dick starts in New Bedford.
Captain Ahab: You’re to look… for a white whale.
But it’s not just whales. The city was founded by Quakers, and became a hub for abolitionists.
Go back to the Civil War -- New Bedford is where one of the first all-Black regiments enlisted.
DANA REBEIRO: That’s where they signed up to fight the Civil War. Frederick Douglass’ son is one of the people that signed up.
And Frederick Douglass -- New Bedford was the first place he lived after escaping enslavement in Maryland. He launched his abolitionist career from here.
Now -- there’s something unique about New Bedford’s Black population today. Overwhelmingly, Black residents here are immigrants -- and the descendants of immigrants -- from a single country — Cape Verde. It’s an island chain off the West African coast. Dana is Cape Verdean -- her Great Grandmother came over on a ship called the Ernestina.
JACK RODOLICO: What is the Cape Verde-New Bedford connection?
DANA REBEIRO: Whaling, because the whaling ships would -- that would be their last stop covered before they came here. And as they lost people, they would say, hey, anyone want to work on a whaling boat? And people would jump on. And that's how Cape Verdeans started coming here.
Cape Verdeans started immigrating to New Bedford in the 1800s, and they’re still immigrating here.
And so for Dana -- a tour of her city is kind of this jumbled mix of American history -- and personal history.
DANA REBEIRO: We're going to look at this mural and this is my favorite mural in New Bedford, because this is my dad, Parky Grace.
Parky Grace, Dana’s father -- his face is painted onto this mural of local labor leaders. In 1970 Parky Grace founded the city’s chapter of the Black Panther Party. He wanted to get people elected who’d do something in New Bedford about poverty, hunger, over-policing, and sky-high Black unemployment.
JACK RODOLICO: So your father is on a mural with Frederick Douglass.
DANA REBEIRO: Yeah.
He paved a way - in part - for his daughter. In 2014, Dana got elected to city council. She served three terms.
DANA REBEIRO: So it was about making sure that my voice is heard, that I'm bringing voices to the table that wouldn't ordinarily be there and making sure that I'm connecting people to opportunities…. Making sure that there's opportunity for the next generation, the generation after that.
Just like in Esbjerg, the wind hub in Denmark, New Bedford’s gone through its booms and busts.
After whaling collapsed, New Bedford was a textile hub - until that industry collapsed in the Great Depression. Commercial fishing remains a big deal here: for 20 years running, New Bedford has been America’s highest grossing fishing port. But at the same time, commercial fishing has consolidated here: they catch more fish with fewer boats and smaller crews.
Cape Verdeans - and the city’s other Black residents - have been here all the while. And no other community here has benefited less during the boom times, or been hit harder during the busts.
Dana brings us into Bay Village, a public housing block. It’s a neighborhood where her grandparents lived.
DANA REBEIRO: Every every weekend. And this was like all like you walk up and down, you smell Mintu, you smell good farm. You smell Kalinga that it was just and everybody knew everyone. And it's the culture where like any adult can reprimand you. ... And then the worst thing is by the time you get back to grandma, they've somehow the word spread out there for you. Oh, my God.
In a park, we settle into a picnic table. And I ask Dana what she sees as the promise of offshore wind to a place like New Bedford. She starts to answer, but then this gaggle of preschoolers march down the sidewalk. They’re just staring at us.
JACK RODOLICO: Pretty adorable.
DANA REBEIRO: I know. Hi guys.
KIDS: Hi! I’m Leah!
DANA REBEIRO: Hi Leah. Those kids right there, like they could have a future in wind. So it's like, what are your interests? Because you don't just have to be a scientist. Like I have zero science background. So it's about making sure these kids know like that there's an open door for them if if they choose to go this route.
So … what kind of opportunities might be on the other side of that door? Whether it opens for New Bedford’s Black residents, or its growing Hispanic population -- or for that matter -- what are the opportunities for ANY city that wants a piece of America’s offshore wind industry.
The biggest prize for a community is to win a turbine manufacturing facility. It's too expensive to ship these massive machines across the ocean long-term. It’s looking like Virginia will get a blade factory, and Albany, New York will manufacture towers.
On the construction side, there will be boom years ... for pile drivers, ship crews, longshoremen. Two cities in Connecticut - Bridgeport and New London - have signed deals to be major construction hubs, just like New Bedford will be.
And then in the long-term, there will be jobs ... for engineers, parts suppliers, office managers, lawyers, web developers, caterers.
But there is good reason to be skeptical about who will land these jobs. The energy industry as a whole is very white. Reports about the oil and gas sector, the solar sector, really anywhere you look in the energy landscape, all confirm that black people do not tend to get these jobs.
It’s entirely possible that the offshore wind industry will simply repeat that pattern.
DANA REBEIRO: This is a European industry right now. So they're coming here. And they there are so much in our country like the foundations that are that have been laid to keep people out, you know, so it's a lot of times I think initially it was kind of lost in translation for them…. You know, you have to educate -- the crazy thing is they know like American history, like way better way dates, boom, boom. But it's the sort of things that I know as a black person, like when I walk into a room that the looks I get.
JACK RODOLICO: And so you're doing some of that cultural translation, too, about, hey, if you want to create jobs, here's how you do it in an equitable way. Right.
DANA REBEIRO: It is and Lars, our CEO, like, he's, I mean, as they say in the streets, he's ‘bout it. He’s like how do we do this? And how do we do this, and really do it? I don’t just want to play word games. I want to see action.
Massachusetts is now requiring offshore wind companies to submit plans detailing how they’ll ensure diverse hiring and channel economic benefits to underserved communities. But it’s worth noting the state made these rules AFTER Vineyard Wind won its contract.
A Vineyard Wind spokesperson mentioned to us a few voluntary steps the company is taking to ensure equity - but we asked for details and confirmation repeatedly, and they never sent them to us.
[mux]
JACK RODOLICO: So I hadn't thought about this previously, but I’m I'm curious now. Is it easier in some ways to have these conversations about substantive racial equity with a company run by Europeans than it might be if it was a company run by Americans?
DANA REBEIRO: Yes, absolutely. [3] [4] My impression... I don't know, I'm not a white American, but I think people get very defensive because that when you bring up certain conversations, they feel like you're calling them a certain thing and they don't want to have that. But I think it is easier.
Obviously, it’s not up to one company to right all the wrongs - to undo the deep inequity that’s sewn into the fabric of a city like New Bedford. And any steps Vineyard Wind takes - those will be voluntary.
So whether this company grows in a way that counteracts inequity - or reinforces it - will be up to them.
MUSIC UP AND DOWN
Annie Ropeik: New Bedford has so far landed two big fish. Vineyard Wind has agreed to stage there, and another similarly sized project — the yet to be approved Mayflower Wind — is set to come after.
But long-term, if wind is going to be New Bedford’s mainstay, the port will need a steady stream of projects. And they’ll have competition. Cities all the way up and down the east coast will compete with New Bedford to win those jobs. And each of those ports has reasons a company might want to go there instead of somewhere else. Little details, like the layout of seawalls, the height of bridges, and the depth of the harbor.
Suffice it to say, this industry is no sure meal ticket for any one place yet.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: It’s a funny thing… quantifying the birth of an industry.
The Biden Administration estimates that there will be 44,000 workers directly employed in offshore wind by 2030. That’s nothing to sniff at. But it’s not jaw-droppingly huge.
Annie Ropeik: More than three times that many people still work mining and burning coal. And eight times as many work in solar energy.
Sam Evans-Brown: Spread those jobs too thin… and will they transform any one city, or union, or type of worker? That’s the question.
[music, rain from Ziven interview starts to rise]
ZIVEN DRAKE: I think that we'll get some steel in the water. We'll see how it goes. And then just one at a time. I can't I can't think about the whole swath of of water down the East Coast. Let's make it happen and then we'll we'll address the rest.
There’s Ziven Drake again… she of the fearless mic check. I want to go back to her for one more point… about the big picture of spending on climate change, beyond just offshore wind. She pointed out that climate change itself is going to be a growing source of jobs … whether it’s jobs that stop climate change… or jobs that help us adapt to it.
SAM EVANS-BROWN: For your future, you're thinking about sea level rise in Boston as being as being a source of work?
ZIVEN DRAKE: It's already happening. Absolutely. It's not a debate about whether or not we have water here when there's a dumpster floating down Congress Street because the seaport is flooded, guess what? The seaport is flooded and right, wrong or indifferent. That's all piledriver work.
[Music]
I'm... I'm a hippie from Vermont. I'm a I'm a big believer in climate change and what's going on. It's devastating. But on the other hand, again, it's it's money in my pocket and job security for myself and my people for... ever.
[Outside/In Theme Music Hits, Fades… Credits]
CREDITS
Sam Evans-Brown: This episode of Windfall was written and produced by me, Sam Evans-Brown, and Jack Rodolico. It was mixed by Taylor Quimby, fact-checked by Sara Sneath. It was edited by Erika Janik, Annie Ropeik, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Taylor Quimby and Hannah McCarthy.
Annie Ropeik: Graphics for Windfall were created by Sara Plourde.
Erika Janik is our executive producer.
Sam Evans-Brown: Special thanks to Megan Amsler, Jennifer Menard, Captain Michael Burns, and Joe Welch.
Annie Ropeik: Music in this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions, Ben Cosgrove, and Brake Master Cylinder.
Sam Evans-Brown: Windfall and Outside/In are productions of New Hampshire Public Radio… which is supported by you… our listeners.
If you like what you’re hearing, make a donation to support us. There’s a link in the show notes, or at our website windfallpodcast.org.