Wind Energy
The climate crisis is one of the defining challenges of our time and in New York, we know climate change is a reality under Governor Cuomo's leadership New York is taking bold strides towards a clean energy future. We are building alternative clean energy projects that will make our communities more resilient over time.
We embarked on an offshore wind master plan really to look at the full range of issues associated with the development of offshore wind. New York was the first state to include the requirement for prevailing wage and project labor agreements in our larger-scale solicitations and we want to ensure that offshore wind is a tremendous driver not only for environmental progress but economic progress as well.
Orsted built the first offshore wind farm in America and is very proud to have done this with the partnership with local labor in Rhode Island, the northeast in the US, particularly Long Island. Long Island has one of the oldest power generation systems in the entire country and the largest demand center for offshore wind. It also has a very large and skilled workforce and that is something the offshore wind industry is going to need. The Long Island Federation of Labor and the Long Building and Construction Trades Council has been working for a very long period of time to ensure that its workforce has the skills that are necessary to compete in a global business like offshore wind.
Wind Energy
Now with projects like our South Fork Wind Farm, Long Island is on the forefront for fighting climate change. The opportunities that exist in the offshore wind is quite large. These are the opportunities that Long Island needs, there is no other group that has better training than the Building Trades, not only to train our apprentices but for continued training to learn new technologies.
These clean energy projects that are transitioning into our future are real we support that as IBEW 1049 members. Our power plants are fossil fuel, we have hundreds of workers that work in those plants. We need to make sure that we have these people either retrained or use their training and qualifications to land a job in the renewable energy side of the house.
We are working with colleges to develop programs to be better suited to not only service these products but to build these products. We have the brains, we have the drive, we have the workforce.
The Workforce
There is an incredible history of innovation on Long Island, we are a place that has a history of doing big things, bold things and given the amount of energy that we can generate here that gives us leverage to be a place that not only is receiving energy but is helping to create it, helping to build it and helping to maintain it. To be become a center for offshore wind and that is what we are working to position ourselves for.
Long Island will be a really important investment opportunity for the global supply chain there will be opportunities around ports that will be needed to build out manufacturing capacity.
It will be great for our economy, for young people starting a new career, for families and for jobs. The governor's vision is a story about creating jobs, creating middle-class jobs, creating union jobs. This is about respect for our environment. The planet we leave to the next generation we are going to make this happen on Long Island. We believe the future is a clean energy economy that produces clean energy and clean jobs. It’s a whole new future for our brothers and sisters in the labor movement, a whole new future for the workers of tomorrow in clean energy. We need to get ahead of the market because that is where the world is going to go so we want New York to lead the way.
