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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.
The Trump administration wants “beautiful clean coal” to return to its place of pride on the electric grid because, it says, wind and solar are just too unreliable. “If we want to keep the lights on and prevent blackouts from happening, then we need to keep our coal plants running. Affordable, reliable and secure energy sources are common sense,” Chris Wright said on X in July, in what has become a steady drumbeat from the administration that has sought to subsidize coal and put a regulatory straitjacket around solar and (especially) wind.
This has meant real money spent in support of existing coal plants. The administration’s emergency order to keep Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant open (“to secure grid reliability”), for example, has cost ratepayers served by Michigan utility Consumers Energy some $80 million all on its own.
But … how reliable is coal, actually? According to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund of data from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit that oversees reliability standards for the grid, coal has the highest “equipment-related outage rate” — essentially, the percentage of time a generator isn’t working because of some kind of mechanical or other issue related to its physical structure — among coal, hydropower, natural gas, nuclear, and wind. Coal’s outage rate was over 12%. Wind’s was about 6.6%.
“When EDF’s team isolated just equipment-related outages, wind energy proved far more reliable than coal, which had the highest outage rate of any source NERC tracks,” EDF told me in an emailed statement.
Coal’s reliability has, in fact, been decreasing, Oliver Chapman, a research analyst at EDF, told me.
NERC has attributed this falling reliability to the changing role of coal in the energy system. Reliability “negatively correlates most strongly to capacity factor,” or how often the plant is running compared to its peak capacity. The data also “aligns with industry statements indicating that reduced investment in maintenance and abnormal cycling that are being adopted primarily in response to rapid changes in the resource mix are negatively impacting baseload coal unit performance.” In other words, coal is struggling to keep up with its changing role in the energy system. That’s due not just to the growth of solar and wind energy, which are inherently (but predictably) variable, but also to natural gas’s increasing prominence on the grid.
“When coal plants are having to be a bit more varied in their generation, we're seeing that wear and tear of those plants is increasing,” Chapman said. “The assumption is that that's only going to go up in future years.”
The issue for any plan to revitalize the coal industry, Chapman told me, is that the forces driving coal into this secondary role — namely the economics of running aging plants compared to natural gas and renewables — do not seem likely to reverse themselves any time soon.
Coal has been “sort of continuously pushed a bit more to the sidelines by renewables and natural gas being cheaper sources for utilities to generate their power. This increased marginalization is going to continue to lead to greater wear and tear on these plants,” Chapman said.
But with electricity demand increasing across the country, coal is being forced into a role that it might not be able to easily — or affordably — play, all while leading to more emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, mercury, and, of course, carbon dioxide.
The coal system has been beset by a number of high-profile outages recently, including at the largest new coal plant in the country, Sandy Creek in Texas, which could be offline until early 2027, according to the Texas energy market ERCOT and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
In at least one case, coal’s reliability issues were cited as a reason to keep another coal generating unit open past its planned retirement date.
Last month, Colorado Representative Will Hurdwrote a letter to the Department of Energy asking for emergency action to keep Unit 2 of the Comanche coal plant in Pueblo, Colorado open past its scheduled retirement at the end of his year. Hurd cited “mechanical and regulatory constraints” for the larger Unit 3 as a justification for keeping Unit 2 open, to fill in the generation gap left by the larger unit.In a filing by Xcel and several Colorado state energy officials also requesting delaying the retirement of Unit 2, they disclosed that the larger Unit 3 “experienced an unplanned outage and is offline through at least June 2026.”
Reliability issues aside, high electricity demand may turn into short-term profits at all levels of the coal industry, from the miners to the power plants.
At the same time the Trump administration is pushing coal plants to stay open past their scheduled retirement, the Energy Information Administration is forecasting that natural gas prices will continue to rise, which could lead to increased use of coal for electricity generation. The EIA forecasts that the 2025 average price of natural gas for power plants will rise 37% from 2024 levels.
Analysts at S&P Global Commodity Insights project “a continued rebound in thermal coal consumption throughout 2026 as thermal coal prices remain competitive with short-term natural gas prices encouraging gas-to-coal switching,” S&P coal analyst Wendy Schallom told me in an email.
“Stronger power demand, rising natural gas prices, delayed coal retirements, stockpiles trending lower, and strong thermal coal exports are vital to U.S. coal revival in 2025 and 2026.”
A transmission line in Maryland is pitting rural conservatives against Big Tech in a way that highlights the growing political sensitivities of the data center backlash. Opponents of the project want President Trump to intervene, but they’re worried he’ll ignore them — or even side with the data center developers.
The Piedmont Reliability Project would connect the Peach Bottom nuclear plant in southern Pennsylvania to electricity customers in northern Virginia, i.e.data centers, most likely. To get from A to B, the power line would have to criss-cross agricultural lands between Baltimore, Maryland and the Washington D.C. area.
As we chronicle time and time again in The Fight, residents in farming communities are fighting back aggressively – protesting, petitioning, suing and yelling loudly. Things have gotten so tense that some are refusing to let representatives for Piedmont’s developer, PSEG, onto their properties, and a court battle is currently underway over giving the company federal marshal protection amid threats from landowners.
Exacerbating the situation is a quirk we don’t often deal with in The Fight. Unlike energy generation projects, which are usually subject to local review, transmission sits entirely under the purview of Maryland’s Public Service Commission, a five-member board consisting entirely of Democrats appointed by current Governor Wes Moore – a rumored candidate for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. It’s going to be months before the PSC formally considers the Piedmont project, and it likely won’t issue a decision until 2027 – a date convenient for Moore, as it’s right after he’s up for re-election. Moore last month expressed “concerns” about the project’s development process, but has brushed aside calls to take a personal position on whether it should ultimately be built.
Enter a potential Trump card that could force Moore’s hand. In early October, commissioners and state legislators representing Carroll County – one of the farm-heavy counties in Piedmont’s path – sent Trump a letter requesting that he intervene in the case before the commission. The letter followed previous examples of Trump coming in to kill planned projects, including the Grain Belt Express transmission line and a Tennessee Valley Authority gas plant in Tennessee that was relocated after lobbying from a country rock musician.
One of the letter’s lead signatories was Kenneth Kiler, president of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners, who told me this lobbying effort will soon expand beyond Trump to the Agriculture and Energy Departments. He’s hoping regulators weigh in before PJM, the regional grid operator overseeing Mid-Atlantic states. “We’re hoping they go to PJM and say, ‘You’re supposed to be managing the grid, and if you were properly managing the grid you wouldn’t need to build a transmission line through a state you’re not giving power to.’”
Part of the reason why these efforts are expanding, though, is that it’s been more than a month since they sent their letter, and they’ve heard nothing but radio silence from the White House.
“My worry is that I think President Trump likes and sees the need for data centers. They take a lot of water and a lot of electric [power],” Kiler, a Republican, told me in an interview. “He’s conservative, he values property rights, but I’m not sure that he’s not wanting data centers so badly that he feels this request is justified.”
Kiler told me the plan to kill the transmission line centers hinges on delaying development long enough that interest rates, inflation and rising demand for electricity make it too painful and inconvenient to build it through his resentful community. It’s easy to believe the federal government flexing its muscle here would help with that, either by drawing out the decision-making or employing some other as yet unforeseen stall tactic. “That’s why we’re doing this second letter to the Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary of Energy asking them for help. I think they may be more sympathetic than the president,” Kiler said.
At the moment, Kiler thinks the odds of Piedmont’s construction come down to a coin flip – 50-50. “They’re running straight through us for data centers. We want this project stopped, and we’ll fight as well as we can, but it just seems like ultimately they’re going to do it,” he confessed to me.
Thus is the predicament of the rural Marylander. On the one hand, Kiler’s situation represents a great opportunity for a GOP president to come in and stand with his base against a would-be presidential candidate. On the other, data center development and artificial intelligence represent one of the president’s few economic bright spots, and he has dedicated copious policy attention to expanding growth in this precise avenue of the tech sector. It’s hard to imagine something less “energy dominance” than killing a transmission line.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
1. Wayne County, Nebraska – The Trump administration fined Orsted during the government shutdown for allegedly killing bald eagles at two of its wind projects, the first indications of financial penalties for energy companies under Trump’s wind industry crackdown.
On November 3, Fox News published a story claiming it had “reviewed” a notice from the Fish and Wildlife Service showing that it had proposed fining Orsted more than $32,000 for dead bald eagles that were discovered last year at two of its wind projects – the Plum Creek wind farm in Wayne County and the Lincoln Land Wind facility in Morgan County, Illinois.
Per Fox News, the Service claims Orsted did not have incidental take permits for the two projects but came forward to the agency with the bird carcasses once it became aware of the deaths.
In an email to me, Orsted confirmed that it received the letter on October 29 – weeks into what became the longest government shutdown in American history.
This is the first action we’ve seen to date on bird impacts tied to Trump’s wind industry crackdown. If you remember, the administration sent wind developers across the country requests for records on eagle deaths from their turbines. If companies don’t have their “take” permits – i.e. permission to harm birds incidentally through their operations – they may be vulnerable to fines like these.
2. Ocean County, New Jersey – Speaking of wind, I broke news earlier this week that one of the nation’s largest renewable energy projects is now deceased: the Leading Light offshore wind project.
Proposed to sit off the Jersey coastline, Leading Light would’ve provided enough power to supply a million homes, according to its developers, Invenergy and energyRe. But now it is no more, after legal counsel representing the project developers submitted a letter on Friday to the state’s Board of Public Utilities saying that they no longer see a way to finish construction.
“The Board is well aware that the offshore wind industry has experienced economic and regulatory conditions that have made the development of new offshore wind projects extremely difficult,” counsel Colleen Foley wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by Heatmap News, adding that it does “not see a pathway forward for the LLW Project.”
It’s unclear whether Leading Light’s demise was solely because of Trump’s renewables permitting freeze and war on offshore wind. As intrepid Heatmap reader (and contributor) Fred Stafford noted, this project had requested multiple delays before Trump entered office, and was suffering from significant supply chain issues that magnified any pain caused by permit woes. “Each request cited supply chain problems and turbine price volatility given its contract, not federal regulatory barriers,” Stafford wrote on X.
3. Dane County, Wisconsin – The fight over a ginormous data center development out here is turning into perhaps one of the nation’s most important local conflicts over AI and land use.
Digital infrastructure firm QTS is trying to build what it says will be a $12 billion data center complex here in the village of DeForest, about a half-hour north of Madison as the crow flies. The revolt against the project has been enormous. The opposition Facebook group has almost 2,000 members now and a MoveOn petition has nearly 300 signatures.
On Wednesday evening, the village of Vienna, adjacent to DeForest, held a meeting on whether to annex more than 1,500 acres of property for the data center in exchange for a $40 million contribution from QTS over 15 years. Residents stormed the meeting opposing the project and got Vienna local leaders to vote unanimously to reject the cooperative agreement for annexation.
There’s evidence opposition to the data center is part of the broader land use techlash I’ve been chronicling in The Fight. Not only is the primary argument against the project focused on farmland preservation but on the main data center opposition group’s website, its president, Rhonda Meinholz, proudly boasts of having previously killed a large-scale solar project Invenergy proposed in Vienna. “I have concerns about any and all large scale development projects that could impact our environment,” she states on the website. “Farmland is one of Wisconsin’s most precious resources and we need to keep it that way.”
Dane County has an exceptionally high support score for renewable energy, and even registers a likelihood for supporting data centers in our Heatmap Pro database. But the odds of opposition are just as apparent, and towns across the county currently have ordinances discouraging solar projects on farmland.
4. Hardeman County, Texas – It’s not all bad news today for renewable energy – because it never really is.
This week Hardeman County approved a tax abatement for an OCI Energy solar project proposed along a farm road in the community. County leaders like the project because it would potentially include millions in funds to the school board and emergency medical services.
A handful of people – described by local media as “over ten” – spoke at the public meeting on Monday against the project, but county officials shrugged it off. “The abatement will help citizens of the community in a lot of ways, but it is going to hurt one or two citizens,” County Judge Ronald Ingraham told reporters. “[It’s for] we think the greater good of the county and I hate that anybody has to be upset by it or hurt by it.”
It’s unclear when construction will begin because OCI is first trying to trap a species of rat present at the project site that is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
