The US offshore wind manufacturing boom that wasn’t

Akinlana Abdalla worked for years inside a sprawling Milwaukee factory repairing generators for onshore wind turbines. Ingeteam, a Spanish manufacturer, opened the plant in 2011 to serve America’s clean energy industries, fixing and producing equipment from its industrial site between the Milwaukee Brewers baseball stadium and the shores of Lake Michigan.

As Ingeteam was settling into Wisconsin’s largest city, a new industry was emerging off the country’s eastern coast. Big energy firms, utilities, and state and federal officials were preparing to build the first U.S. offshore wind farms to provide power for the region’s densely populated and land-constrained communities. Since American companies didn’t yet make key turbine parts, most of those pieces would come from Europe.

This seemed like a promising new opportunity for workers like Abdalla, who is now a business representative for the factory’s union shop, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2150.

By late 2022, Ingeteam’s Wisconsin plant was gearing up to produce more onshore turbine generators — the machines that convert the energy harnessed by propeller-like blades into electricity — partly thanks to federal incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act passed that August. ​“There’s this hunger right now to make Milwaukee the capital of the renewable energy revolution,” Garan Chivinski, a former Ingeteam human resources manager, told BizTimes Milwaukee that fall.

The company and union representatives began having early-stage discussions in spring 2024 about making offshore generators as well, Abdalla said. This was before Donald Trump was elected that November, when the U.S. was projected to build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. (Around 0.3 GW of capacity was online nationwide at the end of 2024.)

“We were going into this whole new boom, like this could really take off,” recalled James Meyer, the business manager of IBEW Local 2150, which has some 6,300 members in Wisconsin and in Upper Michigan.

But the anticipated boom never arrived. 

Instead, offshore wind has floundered in recent years. Economic headwinds and Trump’s political attacks have vaporized the project pipeline and scrambled plans for a supply chain renaissance, setting the industry back by perhaps a decade, experts say. Today, manufacturers that aimed to serve offshore wind have pivoted to other markets or tabled their ambitions. This means that future installations, should the industry make a comeback, will take longer and cost more to complete.

And talks of moving into offshore wind manufacturing fizzled out in Milwaukee, according to Abdalla and Meyer, who spoke in a joint interview from the union’s office in Menomonee Falls. (Ingeteam, for its part, says it never planned to manufacture offshore wind generators at the site.) In January 2025, the company also began cutting jobs from its onshore wind team owing to ​“market-related factors,” an Ingeteam spokesperson said.

“We had a double-edged sword there of losing onshore and offshore [wind],” Meyer said. ​“To get it taken away was really disheartening for the community.”

When hope met headwinds 

America built its first commercial offshore wind farm, the 30-megawatt Block Island, in 2016 off the coast of Rhode Island. 

But momentum truly picked up after President Joe Biden took office in 2021 and called for a massive offshore wind buildout to meet the nation’s decarbonization goals and to accelerate clean energy manufacturing. His administration started leasing huge tracts of federal waters for development in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and in the Gulf of Mexico. The Inflation Reduction Act also created tax credits that offset up to 30% of project costs.

In recent years, developers have completed — or are nearly finished building — six utility-scale installations in swaths of ocean from Massachusetts down to Virginia. Together, they represent nearly 6 GW of clean energy capacity, enough to power millions of homes. 

Those projects enlisted hundreds of companies spanning 40 states that have fulfilled or are fulfilling supply contracts, according to the trade group Oceantic Network.

It was during this initial wave of optimism that Gulf Wind Technology (GWT) opened for business in Avondale, Louisiana. In early 2022, the company built a facility as long as a football field near the banks of the Mississippi River, where it performed advanced testing on giant wind-turbine blades. The goal was to help energy firms develop turbine rotors that were capable of generating enough power to make wind projects in the Gulf commercially viable. 

“If you can only sell the electron produced from the turbine at a certain price, then everything has to be designed and built around that price,” explained James Martin, the firm’s co-founder and CEO.

GWT found partners in oil and gas giant Shell and the Germany energy firm RWE, both of which were considering developing projects in the hurricane-prone region. In 2023, RWE won a federal auction for a swath of water off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana, with the potential to host 1.24 GW of capacity.

Other Louisiana firms also went to work for offshore wind. Edison Chouest built two $100 million specialized vessels along with tugs and barges at Gulf Coast shipyards to serve East Coast projects. Keystone Engineering designed and built lattice-like steel foundations for Block Island.

State officials and policymakers ​“were outwardly bullish about the offshore wind industry and ready for that to play a role in diversifying, especially, the offshore oil and gas sector,” said Katharine Kollins, president of the nonprofit Southeastern Wind Coalition.

Yet it wasn’t long before Martin saw trouble brewing in the fledgling market.

Rising inflation, high interest rates, and supply chain disruptions — spurred by the Covid pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine — were undercutting his customers’ business cases for developing in the Gulf. In 2023, developers canceled a quarter of East Coast projects under contract. Siemens Gamesa ​“discontinued” a $200 million initiative to build the nation’s first offshore wind turbine blade facility at the Port of Virginia. In New Jersey, EEW American Offshore Structures lost a key customer for its steel-turbine foundations that year, leading to the manufacturer’s bankruptcy filing last April.

Still, industry experts described these setbacks as temporary pain, not an existential threat. Then Trump began his second term in January 2025 with a laser-focused mission of gutting offshore wind development. 

Last year, the administration issued multiple stop-work orders to projects under construction. Federal judges allowed work to continue, but not before developers had lost huge sums of money and nearly missed key deadlines. The Interior Department is now seeking to reevaluate federal approvals for planned offshore wind farms and even Revolution Wind, which fully came online in October.

The department has also taken the unprecedented step of paying private energy companies to abandon their offshore wind leases, including RWE, which received $1.22 billion to give up its leases off the coasts of Louisiana, California, and New York. Eight eastern states and California are suing to block the Trump administration’s agreements with RWE and other developers.

In Avondale, GWT’s offshore wind opportunities have vanished. But the company has managed to pivot, Martin said. It is using the same wind-testing and engineering equipment to analyze large satellite dishes, drones, and other defense and aerospace applications. GWT’s onshore wind business is growing, and it also operates in Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, and England — places where some of the firm’s engineers have moved in order to keep working in offshore wind.

“Our market has been taken away, but the incentive to manufacture domestically and supply the [other] emerging industries is high,” Martin said. ​“We’re willing to be agile and diversify, and that’s keeping our profitability.” 

Offshore wind’s murky, costly future

Other manufacturing firms and hubs have also found opportunities beyond the domestic offshore wind market.

At the Sparrows Point shipyard in Maryland, the developer US Wind planned to open a steel manufacturing plant to make parts for offshore wind turbines. But in October, the company turned over its lease to Anduril Industries, which is slated to make steel components for nuclear submarines.

Down the Atlantic coast, in South Carolina, Nexans invested heavily to transform its power-cable facility near Charleston into a factory for high-voltage subsea cables, which opened in 2021. The subsea wires carry the electricity produced by wind turbines to an offshore substation, then run for miles along the seafloor to reach onshore substations.

Nexans, a global industrial firm based in Paris, has supplied and installed cables for most of the major U.S. offshore wind farms, including the completed South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind and the in-progress Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind. The Charleston plant employs over 200 people, who are still making subsea cables — only now for offshore wind projects in Europe, said Pascal Radue, executive vice president for Nexans’ power transmission division. 

“We built up quite a skilled workforce there,” Radue said, ​“and we have every intention to maintain the maximum possible load at that plant, even without having any [new] U.S. offshore wind projects.” He added that the company remains committed to serving the American market, should it rematerialize. 

India-based JSW Steel invested hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to expand its steel mills in Mingo Junction, Ohio, and Baytown, Texas, in order to produce high-grade plates for offshore wind infrastructure. When recently asked about the buildout, a spokesperson said the company’s investments ​“are built to serve many markets, including infrastructure, energy, pipe, and wind. That agility lets us grow with our customers wherever demand is strongest.”

While the firms’ ability to pivot is good news for their workers and local economies, the Trump administration’s maneuvers have ultimately redirected resources and expertise away from the emerging offshore wind supply chain. That will make it far harder for the industry to gear back up, even long after Trump’s presidency ends in January 2029.

“There has been long-term damage done to the U.S. reputation,” said Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF. ​“No investor or banker worth their salt is going to be moving forward with an offshore wind project right now, even if a more favorable executive administration were to come into power.”

Given that offshore wind farms can take nearly a decade to build, he doesn’t expect any additional offshore wind projects to come online by 2035 without major policy changes. ​“Now that developers see the U.S. as a market with potential political risk, it’s going to take a lot to change their minds,” Sholler said.

Radue and others in the industry said that they still expect that, at some point, the country will have little choice but to develop offshore wind. 

The U.S. is staring down an electricity supply crunch as the demand from data centers, electric vehicles, and home electrification continues to climb — and as extreme weather events increase the need for ample and reliable power supplies. California and eastern states have no clear path to hit their ambitious decarbonization goals unless they add gigawatts of wind power off their coasts. Only now, building all that clean power will take even longer to do, potentially translating into higher costs for consumers.

Back in Milwaukee, Abdalla, the union leader and former Ingeteam worker, said that Trump’s hostility to wind and the broader misinformation about renewables doesn’t change those market realities. 

“We have to diversify our power generation portfolio,” he said, a fact that ​“is not going to change.” As for the union’s workforce, he added, ​“We’ll be here. We’re trained to do it.”