Local Content Power List 2026: Jessica Dealy

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Jessica Dealy is working to ensure that clean energy growth translates into tangible, lasting opportunity for the communities it is meant to serve. Early in her career, while helping build workforce development initiatives for Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind, the joint venture between Shell and EDF Renewables, Dealy saw firsthand how intentional community investment strategies could reshape the worker and supplier landscape. That work contributed directly to Atlantic Shores' successful New Jersey offshore wind bid, earning a contract for a 1.5 GW project in 2021, and revealed a critical truth: the lack of diversity that had troubled her since first entering the energy industry in 2012 could only be addressed through agreements that pushed for meaningful, structural change, not performative ones.

As a Senior Advisor at NYSERDA, Dealy draws on experience across developer partnerships, policy design, workforce inclusivity, and program strategy to break down the barriers that have long kept local and diverse workers on the margins of the energy industry. Her work focuses on expanding the workforce investments she helped pioneer at Atlantic Shores to a statewide scale, defending projects under construction by documenting their workforce outcomes, and improving how developers are required to invest in offshore wind workforce efforts. She partners with project developers, state leadership, and community stakeholders to ensure that clean energy investments in projects like South Fork, Empire Wind, and Sunrise translate into durable workforce gains, not one-time hiring surges.

Looking ahead, Dealy sees the greatest opportunity at the intersection of large-scale clean energy investment and workforce continuity. With the industry navigating significant federal headwinds, she is determined to protect the experienced workforce already built and to apply the same inclusive frameworks to New York's emerging advanced nuclear strategy. She believes every electron the State needs in the coming decade must be manufactured, engineered, built, and maintained by local communities, and her leadership is helping ensure New York's clean energy economy is built to last.