On a cloudy February morning, students at Nunez Community College donned their hard hats and climbed up a 40-foot-tall scaffold for the first time. The students are a part of the college’s first, 10-person wind energy cohort. Their degrees will be fully funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program, which provides funding opportunities throughout the Gulf region.
At the end of the two years, students will receive an associate’s degree and an international wind energy certification that will allow them to work on both onshore and offshore wind farms anywhere in the world. The certification was made possible through the college’s partnership with a Norwegian wind energy training company, Energy Innovation.
Cedrick Williams, though, wants a job closer to home. The Broadmoor native said he was drawn to Nunez’s program because he wanted to help Louisiana. After living through hurricanes like Katrina and Ida that wiped out his house’s power for weeks at a time, Williams said he wanted to do something that would protect the environment of his hometown.
“Here I am trying to learn about wind turbines — the components of it, the maintenance of it — to be able to be one of those guys up there working on it one day, hopefully, in my home state of Louisiana,” Williams said.
Before the wind program, Williams worked with Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans environmental justice nonprofit that focuses on wetland restoration, as an intern. Kat Bell, the coordinator of the wind energy program, said she plans to increase outreach efforts to local sustainability organizations like Common Ground and high schools to bolster enrollment in the wind energy program. The next ten students to enroll will have their tuition completely paid for through the Gulf Research scholarship.
“I’m really grateful for the opportunity and I’m just so excited that we at Nunez are providing this for the region,” Bell said. “There is definitely a need for skilled workers, and I’m just excited to be part of a publicly funded opportunity for people.”
Recent executive orders signed by President Donald Trump have ignited confusion and uncertainty across environmental and sustainability industries, including the wind energy sector. The administration ordered freezes on federal funding for clean energy initiatives and the leasing, permitting and construction of new offshore wind energy projects. Because the money for the scholarships has already been awarded to the Nunez, that funding isn’t at risk. But portions of Bell’s and another instructor’s salary, equipment costs and travel costs are funded through federal grants and could be on the chopping block if the college doesn’t supplement the costs. Still, Bell said the courses are moving forward and that she isn’t worried about the future graduates’ ability to find work.
“There are going to be jobs for wind technicians,” Bell said. “Offshore is maybe on a little bit of a pause, but there’s onshore wind farms everywhere. So if we have to pivot, we’ll pivot.”
Bell said if an offshore wind slowdown continues, the college will steer students towards onshore wind jobs.
James Martin, the CEO of Gulf Wind Technology in Avondale and a member of the program’s advisory board, agreed. He said that the graduates are going into a secure career, especially as the demand for skilled workers and energy grows. Martin said wind energy technology has “decade long lifecycles” that likely won’t be radically affected by whatever happens in one presidential term.
Both students and industry professionals emphasized that Louisiana needs clean energy to meet a burgeoning demand, especially as Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, seeks to build an energy-expensive AI data center in Richland Parish. The facility would require around 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which Meta has pledged to match with an equal amount of clean energy. But that goal is over five times higher than Entergy Louisiana’s current clean energy capacity. Offshore wind could help bridge the gap and bring Louisiana closer to clean energy goals put in place by former Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Jenny Netherton, a senior program manager with the Southeastern Wind Coalition who is also on the Nunez program’s advisory board, said permitting and lease bans put in place by the federal government could prevent two offshore wind projects in the Gulf of Mexico from moving forward, even though they’ve already been leased through the state.
“We need to be thinking about large-scale resources that can be deployed, and offshore wind is proven,” Netherton said. “If we need to domestically power all this new industry, then it is a very good option.”
At the base of the Nunez scaffolding training tower, none of the students interviewed by Verite News were worried about their future abilities to find jobs, or about the potential slowdown of clean energy initiatives.
Williams said he isn’t fond of Trump’s executive orders, but is still “very confident that we’ll be well on our way towards having wind turbines in the Gulf.”
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