Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday that an expansion of New York’s $175 million Workforce Development Initiative would include the launch of the Offshore Wind Training Institute at the State University at Stony Brook and Farmingdale. The announcement was part of a series in which he unveiled plans for 2020, to have been formally announced in yesterday’s State of the State address in Albany.
In addition, the State University’s Farmingdale State College and Stony Brook University campuses are soliciting partners for the $20 million training institute, with a plan to begin training 2,500 New Yorkers starting next year, when the offshore wind industry is expected to need a large number of skilled employees.
Separate but parallel to that effort, Orsted and Eversource, which have jointly proposed the Sunrise Wind farm, pledged $10 million to create a National Workforce Training Center in Suffolk County. The training center is to offer curriculum and support services to prepare a work force to fill offshore wind and other green energy jobs as the industry expands in New York. The governor announced in July that Sunrise Wind had been awarded a contract to develop the offshore wind farm that is to send the electricity it generates to Long Island.
“This aggressive, all-encompassing approach to work-force training will bolster New York’s groundbreaking Workforce Development Initiative by helping to ensure workers have the skills they need to compete and succeed in emerging industries that are quickly developing across our state,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Monday.
Thomas Brostrom, president of Orsted North America and chief executive officer of Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind, said in a statement that New York’s commitment to the nascent offshore wind industry “is laudable, and Sunrise Wind is proud to support this forward-looking plan to prepare students and union workers for the jobs that will be available to them in the future. If we are going to achieve our vision of a world run entirely on green energy, these kinds of partnerships and work-force development will be absolutely critical.”