New London, Conn., is an old New England port city that had its heyday about 200 years ago, in a very different economy.

“Ever since the whaling industry, it’s been downhill for the city of New London,” jokes Mayor Michael Passero. “We went from the richest city in Connecticut to one of the poorest.”

Passero, a Democrat who has been mayor since 2015, grew up in New London. He says people have always talked about the city as full of potential, always on the cusp of something big. And now, finally, in the last few years, it’s happening. New London, he says, is starting to boom.

Walking through the city’s small downtown area, Passero points out new apartment buildings and restaurants — a hip pizzeria, a bustling brewery. He gets a little giddy describing the 60,000 square foot recreation center the city is building.

“Just in the last five or six years, we have put buildings on lots that have been empty for 50 years,” he says.

Passero attributes New London’s renaissance to two things: growth in the submarine industry — and the arrival of offshore wind.

New London Mayor Michael Passero says offshore wind has contributed to the city’s recent renaissance. Behind him sits the State Pier Terminal, the centerpiece of the local industry.

Robin Lubbock/WBUR

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Robin Lubbock/WBUR

From a dock near downtown, he points to the centerpiece of the local wind industry: a new $310 million pier where enormous turbines are partially assembled and loaded onto boats to be installed offshore.

Between redeveloping the pier and serving as the staging ground for two of the country’s first big projects, offshore wind has created hundreds of jobs and generated millions for the city and local economy.

The question is whether it will last.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to “end” the U.S. offshore wind industry “on day one.” Since he took office the future of the young industry is anything but certain.

The stakes are high — for cities like New London, but also for much of the Northeast, which is counting on the growth of offshore wind. States in the region have poured a lot of money into getting the industry off the ground because they see it as the best way to meet increasing electricity demands and drive economic growth, while also satisfying their climate goals.

Under the Biden administration, this approach had a lot of support: Biden viewed investments in offshore wind as a key strategy for tackling climate change, creating jobs and boosting domestic manufacturing. The administration worked to make the permitting process for projects in federal waters faster and more efficient, and it supported lucrative tax credits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to help wind developers build projects and entice manufacturers to set up shop in the U.S.

Despite some significant economic headwinds, the industry finally got off the ground during Biden’s term. By the time he left office, 11 large-scale projects off the East Coast had full federal approval, several had started construction and the country’s first utility-scale project was fully up and running. Meanwhile, a supply chain for manufacturing turbine parts, underwater cables and specialized ships had started to take root in the U.S.

The American Clean Power Association, a clean energy trade group, issued a report last summer finding that companies have announced about $16 billion worth of investment in offshore wind manufacturing, shipbuilding and port redevelopment projects — work that could support 56,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

“Those tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment are potentially at risk now,” says Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a think tank that supports the industry.

Trump has railed against offshore wind for decades. He’s described turbines as “horrible” and falsely claimed they can cause cancer. He’s also said the industry is killing whales, though scientists say there’s no evidence of that.

On his first day back in office, the president signed an executive action that paused all federal permitting for new offshore wind projects and set in motion a broad review of what he says are the industry’s environmental and economic harms.

“This has had a tremendous chilling effect on the offshore wind sector,” Ohleth says. “There is a high degree of uncertainty and a high degree of chaos that is leading to real challenges and backsliding for the sector.”

Wind turbines are partially assembled at the New London State Pier Terminal. Soon, they’ll be loaded on boats and taken to the offshore wind farm site for installation.

Robin Lubbock/WBUR

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Since late January, several wind developers have delayed or otherwise stepped back from projects in Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey. At least one company has canceled its plans to build a factory manufacturing underwater power cables for the industry. Wind opponents have filed a flurry of new lawsuits. And there’s the lingering threat that Congress will rescind the Biden-era tax credits the industry relies on.

Not everyone is lamenting this slowdown. Local wind opposition groups from Maine to New Jersey have praised the administration’s actions, as have conservative organizations that support Trump’s plans for repealing various clean energy tax credits in favor of expanded fossil fuel production.

“I feel a lot of compassion for people who thought that they were going to have an industry and then may not have that same level of demand, but I don’t think that it’s a wise use of tax dollars,” says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Furchtgott-Roth calls wind turbines “unsightly” and says they make the country “less competitive,” arguing the electricity they generate is intermittent and too expensive. She believes the Northeast should meet its growing electricity needs by building more pipelines to bring in natural gas from other parts of the country.

“ We have so much natural gas. We have so much oil,” she says.

But many energy experts say this is unlikely.

“ We’re not going to be building new pipelines into New England,” says Dennis Wamsted, a Boston-based analyst with the non-partisan Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “I mean, nothing’s impossible, but it would be very controversial.”

Many Northeast states have imposed regulations that make it hard to build new pipelines precisely because they want more renewable energy instead, Wamsted says. Even without those restrictions, building pipelines in the region would still be challenging and costly because the Northeast is so densely populated.

Plus, he says, the region has some of the best conditions for offshore wind in the world.

 ”You have this offshore resource, which you can pull in through a transmission line,” he says. “You haven’t disturbed a whole bunch of people and you have that power coming right into the demand center.”

New England, alone, expects to need at least 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2050; that’s about equal to the entire capacity of the current regional grid.

Back in New London, Mayor Passero stands at the edge of a dock near the downtown; the giant turbine components at State Pier are clearly visible across the water. Despite the current uncertainty, he believes offshore wind will eventually supply a significant amount of energy to the Northeast, simply because states want to tap this giant source of renewable power right off the coast.

Construction is still advancing on a handful of large-scale wind farms along the East Coast. One of those projects, Revolution Wind, is being staged from the new pier in New London. When it’s completed, another project is set to begin.

Whether that happens, and whether more projects come up behind it, remains to be seen. But Passero has his fingers crossed.

“I’m optimistic that this is just a hiccup,” he says. “I also don’t believe that we have an energy future in this country unless we harness the offshore wind.”