Vineyard Wind jobs report offers look into offshore wind industry employment

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 energy department 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.

Over 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%.

The Public’s Radio in Rhode Island and WBUR have a partnership in which the news organizations collaborate and share stories. This story was originally published by The Public's Radio.