An offshore wind farm being built off the coast of Long Island, New York. AP/Julia Nikhinson

For over a decade, New York has worked to bring wind power jobs to Staten Island as part of an ambitious plan to establish the state as the biggest hub of offshore wind. A centerpiece of the effort, situated in the southwest of the island, is the Arthur Kill Terminal (AKT), an envisioned staging and assembly port.

But on Friday, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation rescinded a 2022 $48 million grant supporting the project that had been funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The news comes after President Trump’s first day memorandum dismantling federal backing for wind energy had already placed the project in permit purgatory, halting the Republican-leaning borough’s push into the offshore wind industry. 

“There’s a lot of money invested in this industry already, and these companies can’t take the hit.”

Boone Davis, president of AKT, began planning for the assembly plant in 2018. He’s no stranger to regulatory barriers hindering wind power; while he worked as a consultant on the Block Island Wind Farm, which opened in Rhode Island waters in 2016 as the country’s first offshore commercial windfarm, he also helped manage the Cape Wind Project in Massachusetts, which, after years of permitting and lease issues, was never built. 

Davis spotted this plot of shoreline on the Arthur Kill strait—the phrase is an English version of the Dutch words for back channel—that splits Staten Island from New Jersey. This slice of New York’s harbor has been used for industrial purposes as far back as the 18th century. Today, a major part of its appeal is that it sits on the ocean side of the road spanning Outerbridge Crossing, allowing the site’s users to assemble tall turbines and get them out to sea.

The construction of the facility would create 600 jobs, according to Charles Dougherty, AKT’s chief commercial officer, and once up and running, manufacturing work would sustain 100 to 150 jobs, all union. The project would also add nearly $400 billion in “direct economic........

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