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It’s been just over a week since one of the 350-foot-long blades of a wind turbine off the Massachusetts coast unexpectedly broke off, sending hunks of fiberglass and foam into the waters below. As of Wednesday morning, cleanup crews were still actively removing debris from the water and beaches and working to locate additional pieces of the blade.
The blade failure quickly became a crisis for residents of Nantucket, where debris soon began washing up on the island’s busy beaches. It is also a PR nightmare for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, which is already on the defensive against community opposition and rampant misinformation about its environmental risks and benefits.
The broken turbine is part of Vineyard Wind 1, which is being developed by Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The project was still under construction when the breakage occurred, but it was already the largest operating offshore wind farm in the US, with ten turbines sending power to the New England Grid as of June. The plan is to bring another 52 online, which will produce enough electricity to power more than 400,000 homes. Now both installation and power generation have been paused while federal investigators look into the incident.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about why this happened, what the health and safety risks are, and what it means for this promising clean energy solution going forward. But here’s everything we’ve learned so far.
What happened?
Vineyard Wind
On the evening of Saturday, July 13, Vineyard Wind received an alert that there was a problem with one of its turbines. The equipment contains a “delicate sensoring system,” CEO Klaus Moeller told the Nantucket Select Board during a public meeting last week. Though he did not describe what the alert said, he added that “one of the blades was broken and folded over.” Later at the meeting, a spokesperson for GE Vernova, which manufactured and installed the turbines, said that “blade vibrations” had been detected. About a third of the blade, or roughly 120 feet, fell into the water.
Two days later, Vineyard Wind contacted the town manager in Nantucket to explain that modeling showed the potential for debris from the blade to travel toward the island. Sure enough, fiberglass shards and other scraps began washing up on shore the next day, and all beaches on the island’s south shore were quickly closed to the public.
On Thursday morning, another large portion of the damaged blade detached and fell into the ocean. Monitoring and recovery crews continued to find debris throughout the area over the weekend. The beaches have since reopened, but visitors have been advised to wear shoes and leave their pets at home as cleanup continues.
Why did the blade break?
During GE’s second quarter earnings call on July 24, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik and Vice President of Investor Relations Michael Lapides said the company had identified a “material deviation” as the cause of the accident, and that the company is continuing to work on a "root cause analysis" to get to the bottom of how said deviation happened in the first place.
The turbine was one of GE’s Haliade-X 13-megawatt turbines, which are manufactured in Gaspé, Canada, and it was still undergoing post-installation testing by GE when the failure occurred — that is, it was not among those sending power to the New England grid. This was actually the second issue the company has had at this particular turbine site. One of the original blades destined for the site was damaged during the installation process, and the one that broke last week was a replacement, Craig Gilvard, Vineyard Wind’s communications director, told the New Bedford Light.
How did Vineyard Wind respond?
By Vineyard Wind’s account at the meeting last week, the accident triggered an automatic shut down of the system and activated the company’s emergency response plan, which
included immediately notifying the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and regional emergency response committees.
Moeller, the CEO, said during the meeting that the company worked with the Coast Guard to immediately establish a 500 meter “safety zone” around the turbine and to send out notices to mariners. According to the Coast Guard’s
notice log, however, the safety zone went into effect three days later. In response to my questions, the Coast Guard confirmed that the zone was established around 8pm that night and announced to mariners over radio broadcast.
Two days after the turbine broke, on Monday, Vineyard Wind contacted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for aid in modeling where the turbine debris would travel in the water. The agency
estimated pieces would likely make landfall in Nantucket that day. Vineyard Wind put out a press release about the accident and subsequently contacted the Nantucket town manager. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting last week, Moeller said the company followed regulatory protocols but that there was “really no excuse” for how long it took to inform the public, and said, “we want to move much quicker and make sure that we learn from this.”
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has
ordered the company to cease all power production and installation activities until it can determine whether this was an isolated incident or affects other turbines.
By Tuesday, Vineyard Wind said it had deployed two small teams to Nantucket in addition to hiring a local contractor to remove debris on the island. The company later
said it would “increase its local team to more than 50 employees and contractors dedicated to beach clean-up and debris recovery efforts.”
GE Vernova is responsible for recovering offshore debris and has not published any public statements about the effort. In response to a list of questions, a GE Vernova spokesperson said, “We continue to work around the clock to enhance mitigation efforts in collaboration with Vineyard Wind and all relevant state, local and federal authorities. We are working with urgency to complete our root cause analysis of this event.”
Did anyone get hurt?
There have been no reported injuries as a result of the accident.
What are the risks now?
Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova have stressed that the debris are “not toxic.” At the Select Board meeting, GE’s executive fleet engineering director Renjith Viripullan said that the blade is made of fiberglass, foam, and balsa wood. It is bonded together using a “bond paste,” he said, and likened the blade construction to that of a boat. “That's the correlation we need to think about,” he said.
One of the board members asked if there was any risk of PFAS contamination as a result of the accident. Viripullan said he would need to “take that question back” and follow up with the answer later. (This was one of the questions I asked GE, but the company did not respond to it.)
That being said, the debris poses some dangers. Photos of cleanup crews posted to the Harbormaster’s Facebook page show workers wearing white hazmat suits. Vineyard Wind said “members of the public should avoid handling debris as the fiber-glass pieces can be sharp and lead to cuts if handled without proper gloves.”
Though members of the public raised concerns at the meeting and to the press that fiberglass fragments in the ocean threaten marine life and public health, it is not yet clear how serious the risks are, and several efforts are underway to further assess them. Vineyard Wind is developing a water quality testing plan for the island and setting up a process for people to file claims.GE hired a design and engineering firm to conduct an environmental assessment, which it will present at a Nantucket Select Board meeting later this week. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has requested information from the companies about the makeup of the debris to evaluate risks, and the Department of Fish and Game is monitoring for impacts to the local ecosystem.
How is the cleanup going?
As of last Wednesday morning, Vineyard Wind had collected “approximately 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads, and several larger pieces that washed ashore.” It is not yet known what fraction of the turbine that fell off has been recovered. Vineyard Wind did not respond to a request for the latest numbers in time for publication, but I’ll update this piece if I get a response.
Has anything like this happened before?
Yes. In May, a blade on the same model of turbine, the GE Haliade-X, sustained damage at a wind farm being installed off the coast of England called Dogger Bank. At the Nantucket Select Board meeting, a spokesperson for GE said the Dogger Bank incident was “an installation issue specific to the installation of that blade” and that “we don’t think there’s a connection between that installation issue and what we saw here.” Executives emphasized this point during the earnings call and chalked up the Dogger Bank incident to “an installation error out at sea.”
Several blades have also broken off another GE turbine model dubbed the Cypress at wind farms in Germany and Sweden. After the most recent incident in Germany last October, the company used similar language, telling reporters that it was working to “determine the root cause.”
A “company source with knowledge of the investigations” into the various incidents recently told CNN that “there were different root causes for the damage, including transportation, handling, and manufacturing deviations.”
The backlash was swift. Nantucket residents immediately
wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines. “I know it's not oil, but it's sharp and maybe toxic in other ways,” Select Board member Dawn Holgate told company executives at the meeting last week. “We're also facing an exponential risk if this were to continue because many more windmills are planned to be built out there and there's been a lot of concern about that throughout the community.”
The Select Board plans to
meet in private on Tuesday night to discuss “potential litigation by the town against Vineyard Wind relative to recovery costs.”
“We expect Vineyard Wind will be responsible for all costs and associated remediation efforts incurred by the town in response to the incident,” Elizabeth Gibson, the Nantucket town manager said during the meeting last week.
The Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe is
also calling for a moratorium on offshore wind development and raised concerns about the presence of fiberglass fragments in the water.
Meanwhile, environmental groups supportive of offshore wind tried to do damage control for the industry. “Now we must all work to ensure that the failure of a single turbine blade does not adversely impact the emergence of offshore wind as a critical solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis,” the Sierra Club’s senior advisor for offshore wind, Nancy Pyne,
wrote in a statement. “Wind power is one of the safest forms of energy generation.”
This story was last updated July 24 at 3:15 p.m. The current version contains new information and corrects the location where the turbine blades are produced. With assistance from Jael Holzman.
Former Biden senior climate adviser John Podesta wants lawmakers to take a red pen to the bipartisan permitting deal.
Podesta criticized a key part of the Senate’s bipartisan permitting deal on Friday, according to a recording I obtained of a fireside chat at the University of Colorado Boulder. He praised the bill’s transmission reforms, but argued Democratic negotiators had handed President Trump “a loaded Howitzer” in their quest for permitting certainty for renewable energy projects, and that it should only pass if lawmakers remove the weapon.
The comments are notable because Podesta helped implement the Inflation Reduction Act and attempted to strike a permitting deal during the Biden administration. That effort, led by Senator Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, ultimately ran aground on criticism from environmental groups.
In the new remarks, Podesta applauded the parts of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act that would unlock new long-distance transmission construction. But he sharply criticized the bill’s reforms to fossil fuel permitting and federal land development. He indicated a belief there will be “give and take when we come back after the election.”
“If you’ve worked on the Hill, you know once you get started on something, you keep going. And I think they were trying to address a really serious problem,” Podesta said. “[The bill would] really take on some needed reforms on transmission to really build the infrastructure that’s necessary to fully integrate renewables into the system, and indeed, I think the bill is pretty good on that. Pretty strong. They got a lot on that question in terms of forcing utilities to use grid-enhancing technologies, doing better planning, getting data centers to pay their fair share.”
But Podesta added: “Then they gave up stuff.” He then unloaded on the bill’s “permitting certainty” provisions, which Podesta notably described as a Democratic priority during negotiations to get to yes.
Those provisions have attracted concern from tribal groups and some environmental groups in recent weeks. If enacted, the bill would bar federal agencies from revoking, changing, or tampering with any federal permits issued after September of this year. It would also prohibit officials from denying or delaying permits in a way that shows a “pattern of disparate treatment” against specific energy or mineral projects. (If you want to read more about the bill’s certainty provisions, you can read our full explainer.)
This was “one place where I think they made a huge mistake,” Podesta said, calling the restriction on revoking or rescinding decisions “one of the worst provisions of the bill.” He complimented lawmakers for trying to address Trump’s attacks on already-permitted renewable energy projects, including stop-work orders on offshore wind facilities under construction, and for seeking commitments from the administration to continue permitting projects in exchange for a deal.
However, Podesta said they are “going to have to take it out” or significantly revise it because he believes this language would allow Trump to illegally approve projects on sensitive or protected lands and courts would not be able to force the government to undo approvals that violate the law. He argued this would mean Trump could permit development in many areas land conservation groups, tribes, and anti-drilling advocates have long fought to protect from industry, including the Chaco Culture National Historic Park in New Mexico, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, and the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
“I think they have handed Trump not just a loaded gun, but they’ve handed him a loaded Howitzer to go after public lands, to permit stuff that even if it’s illegal can’t be reversed by the courts,” Podesta said. “They’re going to have a permit gorge like you’ve never seen, not really caring about whether they’re going through the legal steps to do it, and under this bill, those can’t be reversed. That’s got to change if this bill’s going to pass.”
The former Biden administration alum’s comments are especially noteworthy because he previously helped negotiate a permitting deal that was similarly pilloried by environmental activists. “We did a permitting reform [bill] on the debt limit bill. Some of the environmental community didn’t like it. I thought it was a fair compromise,” he said, referring to that legislation in order to explain why he is focusing on a “provision I think the Democrats asked for.”
“It’s one thing to say I’m getting a lot and I’m going to have to give up something,” he said.
He added that “there are other issues” with the bill in his view, including “removing states’ ability to ensure clean drinking water” and “a lot of restraint on the ability to get courts to enjoin for NEPA violations.” Those are examples where “you can debate whether one is worth the other.”
“My line gets drawn with giving Trump more ways to do mischief and to do bad things, especially to the most important, most iconic places we need to protect."
I reached out to Podesta after obtaining the recording of his remarks, and in a brief interview, he clarified that he does believe the transmission provisions of the bill are central enough to the energy transition that if “they can resolve those matters and fix those problems,” and they can pass it during the lame duck period, “I would say go ahead.”
Podesta acknowledged “another school of thought” — most notably voiced by House Natural Resources ranking member Jared Huffman — that legislators should wait until the next Congress when Democrats may be able to strike a different deal after a potential blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. “Trump’s not making it easy by never fulfilling his end of the bargain. I think they thought he was actually going to go ahead and move forward with permitting these wind projects and instead he’s trying to stop them,” Podesta said.
Still, the certainty language to him is a “poison pill.” And regardless of what Congress elects to do with the permitting deal, Podesta maintained his biggest fear is enacting legislation that protects or emboldens Trump’s behavior: “If you give him things he can interpret that you think you had a deal on, he will make them worse than you could imagine, so you better not give him any more additional power.”
“The question becomes, is it worth trying to resolve these items which I think have surfaced since this text came forward,” Podesta said. “If they can resolve them, fine. If not, there’s always next year.”
When the Ford Fathom debuts in 2027, much of the attention will focus on its size and its price. As it should: The all-electric mid-size truck is promised to start under $30,000, and the success or failure of that car at that price will tell us a lot about the future of Ford, as well as mainstream America’s true appetite for EVs.
While we wait for our first real look at the truck and the full list of its specifications, Ford just revealed a promising tidbit. The automaker has been working in the background to make it simpler and cheaper for Fathom drivers to use bidirectional charging: the ability for power to flow both ways so that EV drivers can use the energy stored in the vehicle battery to power secondary loads, to back up a home power supply during a blackout, or even to feed back onto the power grid.
Specifically, Ford announced on Tuesday that the Fathom will be the first EV from a U.S. automaker with a starting price below $30,000 that does not need a separate wall-mounted inverter — the piece needed to transform the DC power stored in the car’s battery to the AC power used in the house. Instead, engineers built one into the truck’s “e-box” module that houses much of its electronics. That on-board unit is good enough to supply more than 10 kW of AC power to a home, Ford says.
Bidirectional charging isn’t new to American EVs or to Ford. The F-150 Lightning EV got this feature when it debuted five years ago. The trouble is that this game-changing technology doesn’t come cheap: The Lightning — now discontinued, soon to be revived as an extended-range EV — was an expensive ride starting above $50,000. The electrical hardware needed to connect the truck to one’s home power supply added thousands of dollars on top of the truck’s price.
The same was true for other EV makers. Two years ago, when I interviewed EV pickup drivers after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, I found F-150 Lightning and Tesla Cybertruck owners alike who hadn’t forked over more money for the extra tech needed to hook directly into the home. They got themselves through the blackout the Macgyver way, plugging the refrigerator and other critical appliances right into the power outlets in the back of the truck.
Ford’s Fathom, though, comes closer to giving the best of bidirectional charging to the masses. In addition to installing an on-board inverter, Ford says it will make the Ford Home Power Station and Home Backup Panel — the hardware that drivers will need to connect to the house — cost at least 60% less than the brand’s first-generation tech. The Detroit giant also says it’s working with a consortium of utilities, including American Electric Power, BC Hydro, Consumers Energy, Exelon, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co., to iron out how Fathom owners across the country will connect to their homes and the grid.
As Ford notes in its release: “There are more than 3,000 utilities across the U.S. and Canada with largely unique interconnection processes. Interconnection processes were primarily written for rooftop solar and stationary battery storage, which are fixed assets. Bidirectional EVs bring new considerations since they are vehicles first, not stationary equipment.”
Indeed, cooperation between car companies and utilities is suddenly a pressing matter as more EVs hit the roads, and the grid. Rivian and other electric car makers are trying to make their vehicles play nice with the power grid as a way for their customers to save money and reduce grid strain by having EVs charge when demand is low and electricity is cheap. And at some point, electric cars will become a major cog in virtual power plants — the ability of the power grid to pull energy from sources like EVs, backup batteries, and homeowner solar in times of need.
That day is finally approaching. Although bidirectional charging is a striking bonus feature for EVs, something so much more interesting and sophisticated than what a fossil fuel car can accomplish, the tech has flown fairly under the radar in the U.S. One could blame not only the lagging pace of EV adoption here, but also the fact that Tesla, far and away the market leader, has been slow to get on board. Just this month, it finally said that Model Y and Model 3 vehicles, the two best-selling electric cars in America, would get bidirectional capability.
The Ford Fathom, then, may do more than revitalize the lagging fortunes of Ford, which lost billions upon billions in its first forays into electrification and started up a skunkworks team to design the new truck in a totally different way. Their creation might also show Americans the EV’s enormous role in the home, and the grid, of tomorrow.
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Olana is headed for Hawaii with yet more flooding and powerful winds as the state continues to recover from previous storms • Tropical Cyclone Arnab is strengthening into a “severe” storm as it approaches the northern coast of India’s Andhra Pradesh state near the port city of Visakhapatnam • In-fa has become a typhoon, en route by the end of this week to the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. territory that took the brunt of this month’s Super Typhoon Champi.
THE TOP FIVE
1. What worries Anthropic
Call it Anthropic’s magnum Opus 5.5. The Claude maker filed its public paperwork Monday ahead of its planned stock market debut. Aside from the basic details of how the company makes money and what risks its technology may pose to humanity itself, Anthropic mentions the word “energy” at least 14 times in the section of the document outlining the risks to its business. “Climate” and “climate change” are mentioned just four times. The overarching concern, per my colleague Matthew Zeitlin’s rundown of the S-1 filing, is that the company “might not get enough power for data centers running its large language models,” and that “the pace of the energy infrastructure build-out “is generally behind the need.
Brazil’s national oil company, meanwhile, had a brutal day of trading on the stock market following left-wing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s surprise surge to reelection in Sunday’s runoff. Shares of Petrobras plunged 14% on the New York Stock Exchange by the time trading ended Monday evening. While conservative candidate Flávio Bolsonaro had promised more privatization and fewer environmental regulations, Lula has ramped up drilling, particularly offshore, as he seeks to capitalize on South America’s oil boom.
2. A natural gas megamerger creates America’s new No. 1 producer
A hot deal. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
EQT Corporation bills itself as “America’s only large-scale, vertically integrated natural gas producer.” Soon it will also be the largest gas company in the nation. On Monday, the company announced plans to acquire Range Resources Corporation in a deal to create a North American gas giant worth more than $50 billion. The all-stock transaction would also establish the biggest gas producer in the U.S. by output. Combined, EQT and Range pump out 9 billion cubic feet of natural gas equivalent per day. The next largest shale gas producer in the U.S. is Expand Energy, at 7.5 billion cubic feet per day. The merged company would also command a network of pipelines and other midstream infrastructure that tops 3,700 miles. “This transaction brings together two of the highest-quality, longest-duration asset bases in North America and creates a company uniquely positioned for the next era of natural gas,” EQT CEO Toby Z. Rice said in a statement. “We believe this combination creates a must-own energy company capable of generating durable, through-cycle free cash flow while compounding value for shareholders for decades to come.”
The deal is a sign “U.S. gas consolidation is accelerating,” Salih Yilmaz, a senior oil analyst at the consultancy Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a post on X. “The bigger theme is consolidation: scale, concentration, and infrastructure control are becoming increasingly important in US gas, especially as LNG exports and power demand grow.”
3. U.S. wind turbine orders surged by nearly 3 gigawatts this spring
U.S. orders for wind turbines vaulted to 2.8 gigawatts in the second quarter of this year — the highest since the end of 2023 — as developers scrambled to meet the deadlines to qualify for expiring tax credits, according to a new market analysis by the consultancy Wood Mackenzie. New Mexico saw the biggest surge as the SunZia megaproject, the largest wind farm ever built in the U.S., came online, raising the state to the top of the list of capacity additions. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to kill or slow walk permits for wind projects, the industry is on track to add 39 gigawatts of new onshore wind farms by 2030. More than half the projects set to come online over the next two years are already under construction, meaning there’s little risk of disruption. Offshore wind, by contrast, tops out at 5 gigawatts, all of which is on course to be delivered in the next two years. “Policy is the variable with the greatest impact on wind installations,” Wood Mackenzie analyst Tyler Gifford said in a statement. “With tax credit expirations on the horizon, developers are prioritizing projects that can be operational by 2030, so the five-year onshore wind installation outlook remains stable.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, exports of wind turbines are booming. While Europe is still debating how to deal with the sudden rise of China’s wind companies, as I told you last week, the European Union's exports of wind turbines spiked by nearly 11% to $3.4 billion last year, Renewables Now reported.
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4. Exclusive: Clean Air Task Force is out with its new strategy for climate advocacy
The climate movement, as virtually anyone involved will tell you, is broken. Even those who are part of it want to stop talking about “climate change,” according to the results of this year’s Heatmap Insiders Survey. Clean Air Task Force, one of the more pragmatic groups in the policy arena fighting for clean energy, is out with a new memo detailing the strategy it plans to use through the end of the decade. Dubbed CATF Forward, the plan is “designed to drive the global adoption of climate solutions, orienting around three clear impact priorities and rooted in the attributes that have made” the group “uniquely effective” since its launch 30 years ago. “The world’s increasingly complex climate and energy challenges require sober thinking and sharper focus,” Armond Cohen, CATF’s founder and executive director, said in a statement. “How do we protect climate in a world turned upside down?”
His answer:
Prevent pollution by reducing the most damaging emissions at a global scale.
Advance clean power by calling for more energy and more options.
Transform complex systems by grappling with the nuances different industries face and working to shift away from them.
All of that seems fairly straightforward. But the document is defined as much by what it omits as what it includes. Amid a growing debate over whether climate activists should keep targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, which my colleague Robinson Meyer aired out nicely on a recent episode of our podcast Shift Key, CATF isn’t pushing for boycotts of fossil fuels or, you know, committing crimes in the name of saving the planet.
5. An Indian solar giant is investing $525 million to take on China
India’s solar factories have boomed in recent years as the world’s most populous country turns to photovoltaics to meet surging domestic electricity demand and supply overseas buyers looking for alternatives to China. But the subcontinent has struggled to take on China’s dominance of the solar supply chain’s upstream elements. On Monday, Noida-based Jakson Solar announced plans to invest over $525 million into manufacturing solar cells, ingots, and wafers. The company plans to commission a 3-gigawatt cell factory by the end of next year, managing director Ivan Saha told Reuters on the sideline of a conference. The company then plans to stand up a 3-gigawatt ingot and wafer plant by the third quarter of 2028. That will all feed into Jakson’s existing 1.2-gigawatt module-making factory.
THE KICKER
Indonesia and Malaysia have launched more than 100 cloud-seeding missions this year in an attempt to engineer rain to quench parched lands as El Niño worsens droughts. The worst wildfire season in decades has shrouded the region in devastating toxic smog. But the high cost of the effort, including using dry ice to break up warm air that traps smog on the ground, “have so far brought little in the way of lasting results,”Bloomberg reported. “Sometimes, there’s a lot of political pressure to do things that may not be really well-founded scientifically,” Steven Siems, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne and the co-chair of an expert team on weather modification at the World Meteorological Organization, told the newswire.
A hot deal. Joe Raedle/Getty Images