Massachusetts braces for clean energy layoffs amid Trump's cuts
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The number of people working in the clean energy industry has doubled since 2010, to an estimated 115,000, according to the
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Some companies are already feeling the impact. New Leaf Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Lowell, recently laid off 41 workers, or about 20 percent of its employees, blaming the federal government's decision to end the investment tax credit for solar and wind energy.
Dan Berwick, the company's chief executive, said in a statement that the layoffs were a necessary step to remain stable in the face of federal cutbacks.
He said the company's projects will continue to be marketed and sold on schedule.
'The pathway to developing clean energy projects has narrowed,' Berwick said, 'but it has not vanished.'
Wind turbine technicians and solar installers will grow faster than any other occupation from 2023 to 2033 nationally, according to US Labor Department projections.
James Estrin/NYT
In addition to losses in jobs and wages, the report by the research firm C2ES estimates that the cutbacks in federal clean energy incentives will shave about $6 billion, or 1 percent, from overall economic activity in Massachusetts.
Rebecca Tepper, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in an interview that the timing of the bill couldn't be worse. The federal government is withdrawing its support as the
'We need all the megawatt hours that we can get from solar and wind,' she said. 'Solar is the cheapest and fastest way for us to bring energy into the state. It's bipartisan and extremely popular with customers.'
Nationally, the
Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trade Union, said the 'big, beautiful' bill will eliminate thousands of job opportunities. Some offshore wind projects have already stalled, and more may be shelved, he said.
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'This seems to be the biggest job-killing bill in American history,' Callahan said.
But state and industry officials say they are confident that Massachusetts and New England will find a way to continue the transition to clean energy.
'This is a resilient industry and economy,' said Joe Curtatone, the president of the Alliance for Climate Transition advocacy group and former mayor of Somerville. 'It has put billions of dollars into the Massachusetts economy for more than a decade.'
The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that phasing out federal clean energy incentives will result in the loss of approximately 300,000 solar energy jobs, including 6,100 in Massachusetts over the next few years.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Without federal support, Massachusetts will rely on state programs sponsored by utility companies, such as net metering, which allows people to sell excess energy back to the grid, and
Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Commissioner Elizabeth Mahony said policymakers had taken the federal government's hostile approach to clean energy into account when creating state-funded programs.
'There will be some hard times, but [the industry] is going to come back,' Mahony said. 'We want to do everything we can for the next couple of years to be there for them.'
Yogev Toby can be reached at
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COINTELPRO was a controversial program that a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation slammed, saying: "Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity," the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities said in its final report. "The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association." The agency went so far as to send King a recording secretly made from his hotel room that an agent testified was aimed at destroying King's marriage, according to a 1976 U.S. Senate investigation. King interpreted a note sent with the tape as a threat to release recording unless King committed suicide, the Senate report said. MLK assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968 The official story of how King died is that he was killed on the balcony outside his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He stepped outside to speak with colleagues in the parking lot below and was shot in the face by an assassin. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. But Ray later tried to withdraw his confession and said he was set up by a man named Raoul. He maintained until his death in 1998 that he did not kill King. The recanted confession and the FBI's shadowy operations under J. Edgar Hoover have sparked widespread conspiracy theories over who really killed the civil rights icon. King's children have said they don't believe Ray was the shooter and that they support the findings of a 1999 wrongful death lawsuit that found that King was the victim of a broad conspiracy that involved government agents. Department of Justice officials maintain that the findings of the civil lawsuit are not credible. Read the MLK files Looking to read the MLK files yourself? You can find them on the National Archives' website here. Most of the files are scans of documents, and some are blurred or have become faint or difficult to read in the decades since King's assassination. There are also photographs and sound recordings.
