Environmental justice impacts of the offshore wind economy
Diving into the new federal report on an offshore wind supply chain with NREL researcher Matilda Kreider
Welcome back to the New England Climate Dispatch! For this week’s edition, we’re taking a look at the how a domestic supply chain for offshore wind might affect communities in port regions across the Northeast.
This January, the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium published a report on creating a domestic supply chain to rapidly scale up offshore wind energy, a clean energy technology with major potential in the Northeast thanks to high wind speeds and relatively shallow ocean depths along the coast.
Led by researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), this report focuses on how the country can meet the Biden Administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030 — enough to power three billion LED bulbs or 36.3 time traveling DeLoreans, if that’s a helpful reference.
The 184-page report also looked at the potential effects of this supply chain on equity and environmental justice, and how this industry can be developed in a way that includes and bolsters communities that are affected by new offshore wind infrastructure.
To better understand these environmental justice impacts, I recently spoke with Matilda Kreider, the NREL researcher who authored the equity and energy justice chapter of the report. Kreider recently received her master’s degree in environmental justice from the University of Michigan, where she studied the social acceptance of wind energy.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Thanks for reading!
To start off, could you talk first at a broad level about the tension between potential harms and benefits of the new infrastructure needed to develop this supply chain, and how the siting of energy infrastructure has historically gone for local communities?
I think so far in the industry there has really been a focus on the potential benefits to communities impacted by the supply chain. There has been a ton of attention on the potential for jobs, training, new manufacturing facilities that will be a long-term positive influence on communities, and I think there’s just a lot of energy put into this more positive side of it — which is definitely great.
I think that there has been less nuance applied to what it will actually take to ensure that local communities that are impacted by the supply chain have access to those opportunities. So, things like do they have the training that is necessary, are they in the right place, is the timing right, are people committed to diverse and local hiring even if it means spending more on that training or making it a priority.
I think there’s been an assumption that this will have a positive impact on communities, but there’s not always been the real work put into making that happen.
I consider that to be the first negative, that you could miss out on these jobs, you could miss out on these opportunities. Another negative is that there is the potential for pollution, and I think that’s another thing that maybe hasn’t been talked about so much so far. We know from the history of port industries in this country that they have historically had real damage to the people living nearby, whether that’s running diesel engines all the time for the trucks and ships that go in and out of the ports, or polluting the water, or making places more vulnerable to climate change by filling in wetlands.
There’s just a lot of environmental justice history there, and that’s been pretty well documented by the EPA and local EJ groups in those places. Because this industry will be operating primarily out of ports, you can’t really separate it from that history. Just because these parts and components are going into a clean energy industry doesn’t mean the process to produce steel or all these other different things is actually less damaging than it would be if you were building an oil rig. I think in places where you are switching out industries at a port, or maybe constructing new ports, there’s definitely the potential for there to be environmental harms from that.
And then the third harm is the potential for displacement — if you were already working at the port in a different industry but you are not going to be able to transfer those skills or opportunities into a job in this new industry, you may just lose your job. If you have a business that was supporting an industry at the port and now that industry is gone, your business may need to move or might not succeed anymore.
Thinking specifically first about pollution from these ports, do we have good understanding of how to prevent local air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution?
Yea, so for ports in general there is a pretty good understanding of what can be done to alleviate some of these things. It’s kind of more done on the west coast right now, because some West Coast states have more stringent environmental protections than the East Coast states, and there are also really big ports out there, so like the port of LA and other big West Coast ports are bringing in much more industry and things like that than a smaller port on the east coast.
There are lots of things that can be done for emissions reductions, and a lot of ports have started taking those things on. So, things like using shore power, connecting vessels to the grid on the shore to power them while they’re sitting at these ports for sometimes weeks at a time, rather than them running diesel engines all the time, is one thing you can do. Having strong air quality standards that the vessels that are coming into the port have to meet, they have to take their own actions in order to be located at that port. Some ports have started installing solar panels and other renewable energy to power their own operations, water quality testing and different things like mandating what ships can and cannot dump in certain locations.
So those are all the things that are kind of done generally. We don’t entirely know yet for the offshore wind ports what the problems will be, those impacts and what will be done to solve them. That’s something we’re working on right now with the West Coast ports study that we’re doing, to try to model what the emissions will be from these facilities to build offshore wind components, and then figure out where the problems will be.
But one example to call out is that the South Brooklyn marine terminal facility that’s being built in Brooklyn is committed to being a carbon neutral port, because that is something that the community had requested. So that will be a good example to pay attention to in terms of what they do to ensure that that happens.
And in terms of making sure that jobs are created locally, that they’re good jobs, and also that local businesses and residents are not displaced, what can be done — training, working with labor unions, how might that look?
I think that in terms of the displacement of existing jobs, what needs to be done is meeting with the union and maybe the companies that are currently at the port and trying to map out where there may be synergies, so that people can transition to new jobs. For example, if there’s a longshoreman’s union that’s currently unloading ships at the port, and maybe that port is no longer going to be bringing in shipping because it’s primary use is as an offshore wind port, figuring out if the longshoreman’s union has a place in the new industry.
And then definitely the training is huge, and just the commitments to training local and diverse people, committing to not bringing in workers from other places whenever possible, and then the contracting as well, so like minority and women-owned businesses, whether it needs to be funding business development for them, or helping people transition from what they’re doing now with their businesses into the offshore wind industry.
Also, there can sometimes be a disagreement on what local means. Some people hear local, and they say “well, as long as it's in the state of New York, we’re doing what needs to be done,” but obviously that definitely doesn’t mean that the people who are living or currently working near the port are prioritized.
Could you expand a bit more into what the role is, or could be, for labor unions in ensuring that this supply chain is developed in a way that benefits local communities?
I think that’s an interesting one because the unions are already very involved in this industry, there’s no way that they won’t end up being very involved, unless we’re talking about facilities being built in a Right to Work state once we get out of the Northeast and start looking at the Gulf Coast or other parts of the country.
But a lot of these projects and port facilities already have project labor agreements with major unions, and so they will definitely play a huge role in making sure that jobs have training in place, and that jobs are safe, and well-paid. They may not have as much control over whether its long term, just because if you’re working at a manufacturing facility, you have a much better chance of having that job for years than if you’re constructing a wind project that only takes a year or so.
But I think we’re starting to touch on this interesting area of the tension between unions and populations of color, because there’s a very long history of exclusion and racial discrimination, gender discrimination as well, within a lot of union environments. I think a lot of [unions] care a lot and are trying to diversify, but you’ll see that those are still much more white male oriented industry groups than some others.
So, you may see a tension where maybe a port developer has said “we want to have union jobs, and we want to have diverse jobs,” and you wonder if they’ll actually be able to achieve both of those at the same time. I think that’s another thing to watch, how to actually make sure there are opportunities for different groups.
I’m also curious, it seems that a lot of the larger companies that are developing these offshore wind projects are often the big utility companies in the Northeast, which often have had a poor track record of engaging with communities. How can we make sure that these issues don’t continue? What enforcement mechanisms could there be to make sure that these aren’t just disregarded commitments by corporate behemoths?
I think the public-private nature of all of this is really interesting, because you’re right, the developers themselves are private, and they’re often investing in the ports. So, you’ll see a port that’s being co-developed by a government agency and then by a utility or an offshore wind company.
At NREL, we don’t really advocate for policy, and so we sort of just have to point out where the problems are and make some suggestion for how people can do better things, but we can’t do things like advocating for there to be like a national requirement for community benefits or something like that, although I’m sure there are people who think that would be a good solution.
But yea, the utility company thing I think is interesting, because there definitely are histories of distrust there with communities, especially when they associate [utilities] with their high energy bills and not anything else the utility does.
Do you have a sense of along the east coast how many ports we will need to dedicate for offshore wind?
I know that the manufacturing facilities that the report estimates we’ll need at least 34 to meet 2030 goals. There’s like 12-ish that are planned or are already built for the East Coast, from Massachusetts to South Carolina.
There will be a lot. They won’t all be new, so people may not even notice what’s happening because it’s just an existing port that has a new use. But it will definitely have a new impact on the marine industries in the Northeast.
Climate News Roundup
Connecticut
Siting rules around polluting facilities in environmental justice neighborhoods, fossil fuel hookups in new buildings, food waste, and energy costs are all topics to follow in Connecticut’s new legislative session (Jan Ellen Spiegel — CTMirror)
Maine
The Avangrid-funded ballot initiative to limit the borrowing power of a consumer-owned utility has enough signatures (by a slim margin) to appear on the 2023 ballot (Lauren McCauley — Maine Beacon)
Massachusetts
Gov. Maura Healey has so far declined to take action to intervene on the construction of the East Boston substation or the Peabody oil and gas peaker plant, despite demands from activists (Adam Reilly — WGBH)
The EPA has asked the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss a legal challenge by two Massachusetts environmental groups to the agency’s cleanup plan for GE’s PCB-contaminated waste in the Housatonic River (Nancy Eve Cohen — New England Public Media)
The state House of Representatives voted down a measure to make committee votes public, in a blow to transparency in the state (Act on Mass)
New Hampshire
Environmental activists called on legislators to update the state’s climate action plan and adopt a net zero by 2050 target, while Republican lawmakers responded with climate denial (Kevin Landrigan — The New Hampshire Union Leader)
Rhode Island
There is a new federally led study of flood mitigation in the Wood-Pawcatuck watershed, which spans 300 square miles from southern Rhode Island to eastern Connecticut (Cynthia Drummond — EcoRI)
Vermont
Warmer temperatures are bringing struggles for Vermont’s logging industry, which relies on frozen winter ground (Henry Epp — Vermont Public)
Across the region and beyond!
The Biden Administration appears ready to greenlight a massive $8 billion drilling project by ConocoPhillips on Alaska’s north slope, despite the apparent contradiction with the administration’s own climate goals, and outcry from climate, environmental, and indigenous groups (Maanvi Singh — The Guardian)