May 21, 2026 — Forty-Two Acres of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a coal power plant, shut down in 2014 after a decade of community activism, and a natural gas plant, retired in 2018. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.

But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.

For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.

In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.

“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.

In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.

“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”

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