In a much-anticipated jobs report released Friday by Vineyard Wind, the developer said it employed nearly 1,800 workers this year during construction of the nation’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.
The developer provided that number as part of a detailed accounting of employment data submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, which Vineyard Wind was required to produce under an agreement signed when the project was first procured in 2017.
Construction on Vineyard Wind 1 — the first of several offshore wind farms under development by Vineyard Wind’s joint partners, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners — flows through a government-owned pier in New Bedford, where half-assembled wind turbines now dominate the city’s skyline.
But down below, the number of workers on the pier or out at sea has varied significantly based on the nature of the construction work happening in any given week. The fluctuating size of Vineyard Wind’s workforce — which numbered as high as 700 this September — has made it difficult to quantify exactly how many jobs an offshore wind farm creates while it’s being constructed.
The report submitted to DOER digs into data provided by Vineyard Wind’s contractors and provides some of the clearest employment figures yet, offering a significant window into how the offshore wind industry will look as it takes off in America.
Most of the 1,751 jobs created by the project in 2023 were part-time construction jobs. The report’s authors — Michael Goodman, an economic sociologist at UMass Dartmouth, and David Borges, an analyst with Springline Research Group — estimated that Vineyard Wind created the equivalent of about 370 full-time jobs this year.
So far, Vineyard Wind has kept up with several demographic hiring targets it set in a project labor agreement with the region’s building trades unions in 2021. The developer has hired almost twice as many union members as it initially promised.
More than half of Vineyard Wind’s workforce this year was unionized, and more than 70% of those union members came locally from southeastern Massachusetts. The share of people of color employed in those union jobs came in just a touch under the agreement’s goal of 20%.
But Vineyard Wind fell significantly short of its goals for providing union jobs to women and apprentices. The agreement set a goal of hiring women for 10% of its union jobs, but women comprised only 3.6% of Vineyard Wind’s union workforce in 2023. Apprentices, meanwhile, comprised 12.1% of Vineyard Wind’s union workforce this year. The goal was 20%.
A press release from Avangrid that highlighted some of these job figures featured a series of statements from politicians and nonprofit leaders praising the project.
“We have committed significant federal resources toward ensuring our local workers are trained to meet the challenges and opportunities of the offshore wind industry,” Congressman Bill Keating said, “and today’s news clearly demonstrates that those investments are paying dividends in the community.”
“I have said before that offshore wind represents a unique, generational opportunity for New Bedford — but only if local workers were involved from the beginning,” said State Rep. Antonio Cabral, who represents the South End of New Bedford, where Vineyard Wind is staging its construction operations. “I am pleased that the jobs and economic impact report released today for the Vineyard Wind I project shows that the state’s commitment to including organized labor directly in the development of this new industry is paying off for us.”
“We’re talking about a new industrial revolution,” said Joe Curtatone, the former mayor of Somerville and the president of the Northeast Clean Energy Council. “We have to build a whole new energy system, and Vineyard Wind has shown that organized labor is ready to do that work. They can deliver the workers who can deliver the projects.”
