As headlines tell the story of regulatory and legal challenges facing the offshore wind energy industry from the federal Administration, commercial fishermen from New York to Massachusetts are living out a story of hard work at sea supporting construction of offshore wind farms.

Crews from generational fishing families are working with Sea Services North America, putting their skills to use by providing safety vessels for turbine installation workers on New York’s Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind farms 15 to 30 miles at sea.

They are guarding cables yet to be protected under the seabed and they are “scouting” new cable lanes to prevent entanglement with active and abandoned fishing gear.

All of this work, going on around the clock in all but the most extreme weather conditions, is ensuring that contracts to provide domestic, sustainable energy to New York families stay on track. Fishermen working through a co-op structure established by Sea Services helped developers bring New York’s South Fork Wind farm online two years ago. Construction of Revolution Wind, serving Connecticut and Rhode Island homes, is complete and the first turbines to power up have begun sending energy to the grid under test conditions before others come online.

“These offshore wind developers are giving us fishermen another source of money between our regular fishing trips and when a season is closed,” said longtime fisherman Butch Payne.  “And Sea Services is also upgrading our boats with all kinds of safety gear and training for the crews because they need to meet offshore wind safety regulations to work on  the projects.”

While offshore wind projects currently under construction are likely to be the last built during the Trump Administration, the industry supply chain, which stretches across 40 states and includes shipyards, manufacturers, union construction workers, and myriad support services, will remain intact with other work as it awaits a return to policies supporting the much needed energy from offshore wind.

“New York continues to lead the industry and remains committed to ensuring that workers and manufacturers serving current offshore wind projects will be in place when the federal environment changes,” said longtime fisherman Gary Yerman, co-founder and fleet manager of Sea Services North America.

Several projects are in the pipeline off the Northeast coast and beyond. The 2022 lease auction covering the New York Bight brought in $4.3 billion when the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management auction six lease areas there. It was the highest-grossing U.S. offshore energy lease sale in history — surpassing even the most lucrative offshore oil and gas lease auctions.

BOEM estimated the six lease sites could generate up to 7 GW of offshore wind energy, enough to power up to two million homes.