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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.
I’m partially convinced this is psy op, or at least a figment of how social media organizes attention. I have a hypothesis that various “For You” page algorithms, especially that of the social network X, began to reward content that performed unusually well across national borders a few years ago. Since then, the amount of America vs. Europe content has surged. (Of course, writers have been comparing American and European lifestyles for much longer than that.)
Suffice it to say, though: It’s a fraught topic. I’ve assumed that as extreme heat gets worse as the climate changes, Europeans will simply get on with it and install AC, much as Americans in the Pacific Northwest have done. Yet there are cultural and regulatory obstacles to AC’s growth in Europe.
I’m sure I’ll write about it in the future, but for now I want to get a grip on the facts themselves. And so as a Friday special, I present to you — the facts about European AC, as I understand it:
Only about 19% of European homes have air conditioning. That’s less than the United States, of course. But it’s also less than Canada, which has a more comparable climate. Nearly 70% of Canadian homes have air conditioning or equivalent equipment.
The United States doesn’t have the world’s highest rates of air conditioning penetration, by the way, although 88% of us do have some form of AC. The number one spot is held by Japan, where 91% of homes have cooling.
Only 0.8% of European household energy use goes to space cooling. Again, for comparison, that’s about half the share of energy that goes to space cooling in Canada. (In the U.S., about 6% of household energy use goes to space cooling — and despite our warmer climate, far more energy on average goes to space heating in the winter.)
That said, Europe is catching up fast, particularly in warm countries. Air conditioning penetration has more than doubled in Europe since 1990. More than half of Italian households now have air conditioning. That rate has nearly doubled since 2013, and it has grown much faster in southern Italy than northern Italy.
The further north you go, the more the rates fall. About 28% of French homes and 13% of apartments have some kind of air conditioning. Only about 6% of German homes have AC.
Just over 4% of British homes have air conditioning. What’s most striking to me, though, is that the elderly are most susceptible to heat-related death — and only 3% of households with someone over 75 in the UK have AC.
The movement against data centers is raising up a raison d'etre of the anti-renewables movement: protecting would-be farmland.
Farm owners and operators across the U.S. are winning national headlines almost every week for rejecting big dollar offers from data center developers. In Hanover County, Virginia, protestors are chanting “Grow Tomatoes, Not Data Centers.” In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Republican legislators are mulling proposals to block the sale of so-called “prime farmland” for data center development. In Texas, the fight over data center development has engulfed the race for the state’s ag commissioner seat. In the Midwest, where agriculture reigns supreme, statewide races and congressional campaigns are slowly but surely being defined by the issue. Like in Nebraska where Austin Ahlman, an independent candidate running for Congress in Nebraska’s first district, told me he believes the data center backlash is reflective of a populist politics that broadly criticize elites and top-down control of the economy: “I think sometimes people misunderstand the anxieties of rural Americans when it comes to these data centers because a lot of their fears are about control long term.”
Unlike the farmland backlash around renewable energy development, the loudest critics are on the anti-monopolist left. On Wednesday, the prominent opposition group Food and Water Watch signaled farmland could soon be a watchword in the national data center debate – in a fashion analogous to what we’ve seen with renewable energy. The organization’s blog post entitled “The AI Data Center Boom Is Coming for Farmers” declared data centers verboten because of the threat they posed to “small and midsized family farmers.” Mitch Jones, deputy director of the campaign outfit, said he believes the threat to farmland is “a compelling reason to oppose data center development” but that his organization’s fight is primarily focused on protecting small business owners and an anti-monopoly sentiment.
“If data centers are coming into their areas, this puts even more pressure on them. It drives up the cost of their electricity, just as it does anyone else. It competes with them for water for crops, and it affects the value of their land in a perverse way,” Jones told me.
None of this should be surprising. An agricultural workforce has always been a good barometer for figuring out if a community will accept new infrastructure of any kind. We’ve seen as much time and time again with renewable energy, carbon capture, fossil energy and mining, just to name a few industries.
This same rule is true with data centers. In April, county commissioners in Kosciusko County, Indiana, unanimously rejected a Prologis data center; nearly 90% of acreage in Kosciusko County is being actively farmed, according to the Heatmap Pro database. Linn County, Iowa, in February enacted a rule severely restricting data center development in unincorporated areas; almost three-fourths of the land is used by the ag sector. A potential Amazon facility is causing heartburn in Clinton County, Ohio; nearly all land in the county is used for farming and utility-scale solar development has a recent history of conflict with landowners.
To be candid, I’m struck by the similarity in the backlash over siting data centers on farmland – a resemblance so close that some counties are starting to restrict renewable energy and data center development on farmland at the same time. This week, Eau Claire County, Wisconsin created a new “farmland preservation plan” discouraging utility-scale solar energy and data centers on any potential farmland. (More than 40% of land in this county is currently being used for farmland, according to Heatmap Pro.)
Jones at Food and Water Watch said his organization taking on the “protect farmland” mantle had nothing to do with the success this argument has had against renewable energy. “That thought never entered my head,” he told me, adding that if communities respond to the data center backlash by taking steps that short-circuit solar and wind too, that’s “a coincidence.”
I kept pressing. What if the pivot to farmland protection leads to more communities restricting renewable energy along with the data centers? “If you’re looking for a reason to oppose solar and wind, you can come up with that without having to attach data centers to it,” Jones said. “We’ve seen rural communities oppose solar and wind before data centers blew up across the country. It’s nothing new.”
1. Virginia Beach, Virginia – The right-wing interest group lawsuit against Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind is now dead, concluding one of the wackier tales of the Trump 2.0 energy era.
In case you may have forgotten, conservative activists – including climate denial organization the Heartland Institute – sued the federal government in 2024 to strike down the permits for the Virginia offshore wind project arguing that it didn’t take into account impacts on North Atlantic right whales. The lawsuit played into misinformed public fears that offshore wind was killing lots of endangered whales.
After Trump re-entered office last year, there were glimmers this lawsuit would become a sue-and-settle case. But the feds ultimately let that idea go amidst heavy lobbying. In May, the presiding judge ruled against the conservatives and last week their lawyers dismissed the appeal.
This outcome removes one of the more ridiculous hypotheticals possible here – that Trump would forcibly deconstruct Coastal Virginia. The project is nearing completion and began delivering power to the coastline in March. I’d consider this one as good as done.
2. Box Elder County, Utah – Call it the Box Elder County massacre.
On Tuesday, voters in Kevin O’Leary’s data center development jurisdiction soundly rejected incumbent candidates in an election result that ousted two sitting commissioners who voted for the Shark Tank judge’s controversial hyperscale proposal. They also ousted the county sheriff.
Elsewhere in the state Utahns took out state Senate President Stuart Adams, which local political pundits attributed to his role chairing the state entity involved in the O’Leary project known as Stratos.
It’s unclear how these election results will impact the Stratos project. At the same time, voters usually remember if a clear statement like this is ignored. Box Elder County only two weeks ago issued a 180-day moratorium, but that didn’t impact Stratos.
As an aside: on Thursday, O’Leary posted to social media recanting a claim he’d made for months about Chinese entities funding Utah-based opponents of his project, stating he has “no evidence” any of the people or groups he’d previously named “are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party.” Maybe somebody was afraid of a defamation threat? Who’s to say.
3. Davidson County, Tennessee – We have the latest updates in the Nashville Zoo data center drama and they’re a doozy and a half.
Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell claimed Thursday that developer DC Blox failed to meet with the owner of the Nashville Zoo despite instructions to do so before advancing their project next to the site. This led the zoo to learn about the project from media reporting – talk about a community engagement failure!
The Nashville city council, which is quickly becoming quite hostile to the data center will meet after the July 4th holiday to consider whether to enact a comprehensive zoning measure and a temporary moratorium on data center development. Nashville’s metro council sent both proposals to the city council earlier this week. A moratorium would block the DC Blox project. Company leaders claim they’ll move forward as planned because they do have permits.
Conversations with nearby landowners are crucial for community engagement.
4. Clark County, Ohio – Yet another utility-scale solar farm is in the Ohio state permitting graveyard.
The Ohio Power Siting Board rejected Invenergy’s Sloopy Solar project, pointing to “unanimous” opposition from municipal and county officials at and surrounding the project site. I predicted this would happen back in January. This would’ve been the county’s first utility-scale solar project.
The board also gave permission for Hillclimber Solar to withdraw its proposal to build a contested solar farm in Knox County, where anti-solar sentiments run so hot they determine who runs the county commission. So that makes two more down.
