![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/01410bbf1257fb73e10ba0c8c50b969efd-Wind-farm-KBarge.rsquare.w700.jpg\")
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\n The cable-laying barge used to construct a wind farm more than a dozen miles out to sea.
\n Photo: David S. Allee\n <\/p>\n
For more than a year, thousands of unionized ironworkers, carpenters, and operating engineers have been constructing a colossal wind farm in an 80,000-acre expanse of ocean south of Long Island. A football-field-size barge, ushered along by tugboats, has been installing the cable that will connect Empire Wind 1 to the grid along the seafloor, a power line so massive that Hugh McElroen, an electrician working on the project, compares it to a \u201ctree trunk.\u201d The turbines themselves will be nearly 900 feet tall; though barely visible from the shoreline \u2014 they\u2019ll poke from the horizon like matchsticks \u2014 it will take the world\u2019s second-largest crane to help assemble them. The project could eventually supply the city with enough energy to power nearly half the homes in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
Despite its hulking size and ambition, the building of Empire Wind 1 has been something of a covert operation. The Trump administration is openly hostile to wind projects, and EW1 has so far survived only because of delicate negotiations.<\/p>\n
This past April, the federal government froze construction on the project for several weeks \u2014\u00a0until Governor Kathy Hochul reportedly made a Faustian agreement to grant permits to a natural-gas pipeline Trump wanted built in New York. In December, the Feds ordered another construction halt of Empire Wind 1, along with four other offshore wind projects, arguing the turbines could warp government radar readings. Equinor, the Norwegian energy company behind EW1, swiftly sued and won an injunction on January 15 to continue construction. \u201cYou\u2019re all over the map on this,\u201d the judge in the case told a government lawyer after his justifications for the pause kept shifting. Three of the other four offshore wind projects have also successfully restarted construction thanks to court orders.<\/p>\n
If Empire Wind 1 reaches completion next year as planned, it will help the city solve an impending energy crisis, meet climate goals, and build demand for thousands of union jobs. As a result, the effort is backed by an unlikely coalition: city- and state-government types, NIMBY-ish Brooklynites, a $65 billion energy company, and a blue-collar workforce represented by a cluster of different unions. Organized labor, in particular, is gambling that EW1 is just the first of a generation\u2019s worth of contracts \u2014 that building green infrastructure could be what car manufacturing or coal mining was for past unions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have invested a lot of resources, funding, and energy into training our membership for this,\u201d Danny Bianco, the regional manager of LIUNA, a massive construction-workers union in New England, tells me. One required training session simulates a helicopter crash at sea; the trainees have to escape from a mocked-up fuselage after it\u2019s dropped into a giant pool. McElroen\u2019s union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union No. 3, was mulling acquiring its own helicopter-escape facility, but the government\u2019s war against wind makes it impossible to know where to invest long-term.<\/p>\n
The story of Empire Wind 1 starts on 73 acres of crumbling, city-owned parking lot in waterfront Sunset Park. In the 2010s, the city\u2019s Economic Development Corporation solicited proposals for the land. Locals were nervous. Overbuilding in Williamsburg, another formerly industrial waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, had rendered it unrecognizable to its longtime residents.<\/p>\n
\u201cEDC sucks,\u201d says Carlos Menchaca, the City Council member who represented Sunset Park at the time. \u201cThey come with zero vision. They\u2019re just like, \u2018Well, we wanna be able to do anything.\u2019\u201d So stakeholders in Sunset Park started a task force that would articulate terms necessary for local buy-in.<\/p>\n
According to Elizabeth Yeampierre, a member of the task force and the director of a Sunset Park\u2013based environmental-justice organization called UpRose, there were two main conditions residents had for development: \u201cThey wanted to retain the industrial character of the community,\u201d she says, \u201cbut they didn\u2019t want it to kill them\u201d with pollution. Red Hook Terminals, which off-loads shipping cargo landing at Brooklyn\u2019s ports, was the industrial partner. Its president, Mike Stamatis, began his career as a dock worker off-loading imported bananas into Newark. He was also a surprising environmental voice.<\/p>\n
On October 22, 2012, the night Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, Stamatis was asleep in his office, a converted trailer surrounded by shipping containers at the Red Hook docks. He had begun the night \u201cwatching Netflix reruns of Columbo,\u201d he says, and ended it being rescued from his flooded office. It convinced him that the future of waterfront industry in Brooklyn needed to be sustainable.<\/p>\n
In 2015, the task force delivered a list of conditions to EDC, including organized-labor requirements and caps on levels of vehicle exhaust. The corporation signed. Four years later, the State Assembly mandated<\/a> the development of 9,000 megawatts\u2019 worth of offshore wind by 2035. Already planning offshore developments in the U.S., Equinor stepped forward with a $5 billion offer to transform the Sunset Park lot into a port terminal to serve future fields of offshore turbines.<\/p>\n Because EDC signed the agreement with the Sunset Park Task Force before Equinor was involved, potential sticking points in negotiations with the Norwegian company \u2014 including a requirement that the bulk of workers be local \u2014 weren\u2019t even up for debate. Even so, Yeampierre found an easy partner in Equinor: \u201cThey were open.\u201d She recalls the first meetings between Equinor and the community, which included visible efforts to appease local sensibilities. \u201cOf course, they had hired a Latina to come and talk to us,\u201d says Yeampierre.<\/p>\n When ground broke in 2024, both city business developers and longtime residents rejoiced: Sunset Park would be the home of one of the nation\u2019s largest renewable-energy projects.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s personal vendetta against wind farms started around 2011, when one was built off the coast of\u00a0 his Scotland golf course<\/a> and, in his opinion, marred the view. Since returning to the White House, he has worked to squash wind development in the U.S. Because offshore wind projects are in federal waters \u2014 the government leases the real estate to developers \u2014 they are the perfect target for the president\u2019s meddling.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no clear winner yet. The injunctions are keeping the wind projects alive, but only while developers and the federal government continue duking it out in courts. If the Trump administration succeeds in killing Empire Wind 1 or the other wind farms currently in construction, it would waste billions of dollars, shred a decade of planning, and eliminate thousands of prospective jobs.<\/p>\n