Rick Karlin reports in the Times Union that a labor agreement has been reached between General Electric and two major unions for facilities the company wants to build for offshore wind equipment manufacturing at the Port of Coeymans in southern Albany County. GE wants to build turbine blades and the housings that contain electric generating equipment for wind power projects off the Long Island coast. New York State has plans for 4.6 gigawatts of offshore wind projects off the Long Island coast, and GE believes they can create 870 jobs if all the proposals become reality. Now they have an agreement with the IUE-CWA unions for GE to remain neutral during the labor organizing process for the plants. GE is splitting up its company next year, and Vernova is the name of the power portion of GE. Currently about 825 of GE Vernova’s U.S. employees, including about 700 in New York, are represented by the IUE-CWA unions. “As a leader in the U.S. wind industry and the company that introduced the first 12MW + offshore wind turbine, GE Vernova is pleased to have worked with the IUE-CWA on this labor peace agreement associated with our proposal to build two, state-of-the-art offshore wind factories in New York,” officials from GE and the unions said in a joint statement. Read more about this story in the Times Union.