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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.
Two years ago, Trey Lauderdale asked not what nuclear power could do for artificial intelligence, but what artificial intelligence could do for nuclear power.
The value of atomic power stations to provide the constant, zero-carbon electricity many data centers demand was well understood. What large language models could do to make building and operating reactors easier was less obvious. His startup, Atomic Canyon, made a first attempt at answering that by creating a program that could make the mountains of paper documents at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, California’s only remaining station, searchable. But Lauderdale was thinking bigger.
In September, Atomic Canyon inked a deal with the Idaho National Laboratory to start devising industry standards to test the capacity of AI software for nuclear projects, in much the same way each update to ChatGPT or Perplexity is benchmarked by the program’s ability to complete bar exams or medical tests. Now, the company’s effort is going global.
On Wednesday, Atomic Canyon is set to announce a partnership with the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to begin cataloging the United Nations nuclear watchdog’s data and laying the groundwork for global standards of how AI software can be used in the industry.
“We’re going to start building proof of concepts and models together, and we’re going to build a framework of what the opportunities and use cases are for AI,” Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s chief executive, told me on a call from his hotel room in Vienna, Austria, where the IAEA is headquartered.
The memorandum of understanding between the company and the UN agency is at an early stage, so it’s as yet unclear what international standards or guidelines could look like.
In the U.S., Atomic Canyon began making inroads earlier this year with a project backed by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and the Electric Power Research Institute to create a virtual assistant for nuclear workers.
Atomic Canyon isn’t the only company applying AI to nuclear power. Last month, nuclear giant Westinghouse unveiled new software it’s designing with Google to calculate ways to bring down the cost of key components in reactors by millions of dollars. The Nuclear Company, a startup developer that’s aiming to build fleets of reactors based on existing designs, announced a deal with the software behemoth Palantir to craft the software equivalent of what the companies described as an “Iron Man suit,” able to swiftly pull up regulatory and blueprint details for the engineers tasked with building new atomic power stations.
Lauderdale doesn’t see that as competition.
“All of that, I view as complementary,” he said.
“There is so much wood to chop in the nuclear power space, the amount of work from an administrative perspective regarding every inch of the nuclear supply chain, from how we design reactors to how we license reactors, how we regulate to how we do environmental reviews, how we construct them to how we maintain,” he added. “Every aspect of the nuclear power life cycle is going to be transformed. There’s no way one company alone could come in and say, we have a magical approach. We’re going to need multiple players.”
That Atomic Canyon is making inroads at the IAEA has the potential to significantly broaden the company’s reach. Unlike other energy sources, nuclear power is uniquely subject to international oversight as part of global efforts to prevent civilian atomic energy from bleeding over into weapons production.
The IAEA’s bylaws award particular agenda-setting powers to whatever country has the largest fleet of nuclear reactors. In the nearly seven decades since the agency’s founding, that nation has been the U.S. As such, the 30 other countries with nuclear power have largely aligned their regulations and approaches to the ones standardized in Washington. When the U.S. artificially capped the enrichment levels of traditional reactor fuel at 5%, for example, the rest of the world followed.
That could soon change, however, as China’s breakneck deployment of new reactors looks poised to vault the country ahead of the U.S. sometime in the next decade. It wouldn’t just be a symbolic milestone. China’s emergence as the world’s preeminent nuclear-powered nation would likely come with Beijing’s increased influence over other countries’ atomic energy programs. As it is, China is preparing to start exporting its reactors overseas.
The role electricity demand from the data centers powering the AI boom has played in spurring calls for new reactors is undeniable. But if AI turns out to have as big an impact on nuclear operations as Lauderdale predicts, an American company helping to establish the global guidelines could help cement U.S. influence over a potentially major new factor in how the industry works for years, if not decades to come.
Current conditions: The Northeastern U.S. is bracing for 6 inches of snow, including potential showers in New York City today • A broad swath of the Mountain West, from Montana through Colorado down to New Mexico, is expecting up to six inches of snow • After routinely breaking temperature records for the past three years, Guyana shattered its December high with thermometers crossing 92 degrees Fahrenheit.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Energy Department shells out $800 million to two nuclear projects
The Department of Energy gave a combined $800 million to two projects to build what could be the United States’ first commercial small modular reactors. The first $400 million went to the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority to finance construction of the country’s first BWRX-300. The project, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called the TVA’s “big swing at small nuclear,” is meant to follow on the debut deployment of GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt SMR at the Darlington nuclear plant in Ontario. The second $400 million grant backed Holtec International’s plan to expand the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan where it’s currently working to restart with the company’s own 300-megawatt reactor. The funding came from a pot of money earmarked for third-generation reactors, the type that hew closely to the large light water reactors that make up nearly all the U.S. fleet of 94 commercial nuclear reactors. While their similarities with existing plants offer some benefits, the Trump administration has also heavily invested in incentives to spur construction of fourth-generation reactors that use coolants other than water. “Advanced light-water SMRs will give our nation the reliable, round-the-clock power we need to fuel the President’s manufacturing boom, support data centers and AI growth, and reinforce a stronger, more secure electric grid,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. “These awards ensure we can deploy these reactors as soon as possible.”
You know who also wants to see more investment in SMRs? Arizona senator and rumored Democratic presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who released an energy plan Wednesday calling on the Energy Department to ease the “regulatory, scaling, and supply chain challenges” new reactors still face.
2. Trump considers changing black lung protections for coal miners
Since he first emerged on the political scene a decade ago, President Donald Trump has made the proverbial forgotten coal miner a central theme of his anti-establishment campaigns, vowing to correct for urbanite elites’ neglect by putting workers’ concerns at the forefront. Yet his administration is now considering overhauling black lung protections that miners lobbied federal agencies to enact and enforce. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer will “reconsider and seek comments” on parts of the Biden-era silica rule that mining companies and trade groups are challenging in court, the agency told E&E News. It’s unclear how the Trump administration may seek to alter the regulation. But the rule, finalized last year, reduced exposure limits for miners to airborne silica crystals that lodge deep inside lung tissue to 50 micrograms from the previous 100 microgram limit. The rule also required companies to provide expanded medical tests to workers. Dozens of miners and medical advocates protested outside the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October to request that the rule, expected to prevent more than 1,000 deaths and 3,700 cases of black lung per year, be saved.
Rolling back some of the protections would be just the latest effort to gut Biden-era policy. On Wednesday, the White House invited automotive executives to attend what’s expected to be an announcement to shred fuel-efficiency standards for new vehicles, The New York Times reported late on Tuesday.
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3. Americans faced worse blackouts last year than any year in the past decade
A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA
The average American spent a combined 11 hours without electricity last year as a result of extreme weather, worse outages than during any previous year going back a decade. That’s according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Blackouts attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2025, compared to an average of roughly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023. Major hurricanes accounted for 80% of the hours without electricity in 2024.
4. Bill Gates’ TerraPower clears final safety hurdle
The latest federal grants may be good news for third-generation SMRs, but one of the leading fourth-generation projects — the Bill Gates-owned TerraPower’s bid to build a molten salt-cooled reactor at a former coal plant in Wyoming — just cleared the final safety hurdle for its construction permit. Calling the approval a “momentous occasion for TerraPower,” CEO Chris Levesque said the “favorable safety evaluation from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”
TerraPower’s project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is meant to demonstrate the company’s reactors, which are designed to store power when it’s needed — making them uniquely complementary to grids with large amounts of wind and solar — to avoid the possibility of a meltdown. Still, at a private lunch I attended in October, Gates warned that the U.S. is falling behind China on nuclear power. China is charging ahead on all energy fronts. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese had started up a domestically-produced gas turbine for the first time as the country seeks to compete with the U.S. on even the fossil fuels American producers dominate.
5. BP abandons a key blue hydrogen project
It’s been a rough year for green hydrogen projects as the high cost of producing the zero-carbon fuel from renewable electricity and water makes finding customers difficult for projects. Blue hydrogen, the version of the fuel made with natural gas equipped with carbon capture equipment, isn’t doing much better. Last month, Exxon Mobil Corp. abandoned plans to build what would have been one of the world’s largest hydrogen production plants in Baytown, Texas. This week, BP withdrew from a blue hydrogen project in England. At issue are strict new standards in the European Union for how much carbon blue hydrogen plants would need to capture to qualify as clean.
THE KICKER
You’re not the only one accidentally ingesting loads of microplastics. New research suggests crickets can’t tell the difference between tiny bits of plastics and natural food sources. Evidence shows that crickets can break down microplastics into smaller nanoplastics — which may be even worse in the environment since they’re more easily eaten or absorbed by other lifeforms.
2025 has been incredibly eventful for decarbonization — and not necessarily in a good way. The return of Donald Trump, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the rise of data centers and artificial intelligence led to more changes for climate policy and the clean energy sector than we’ve seen in years. Some of those we saw coming. Others we really did not.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse look back at the year’s biggest energy and decarbonization stories and examine what they got right — and what they got wrong. What’s been most surprising about the Trump administration? Why didn’t the Inflation Reduction Act’s policies help prevent the law’s partial repeal? And why have AI and the data center boom become a much bigger driver of power growth than we once thought?
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: I think what I’m saying on the organizing side is that all of the organizing and comms effort was going in, as you pointed out, to a base-building and turnout strategy, not a constituency-expanding, coalition-building strategy, right? The effort was to go deep, not wide.
I think that was the fundamental mistake because there wasn’t a lot of depth there. There wasn’t this big, untapped pool of youth voters waiting to be turned out. And it meant we put basically no effort into expanding the broad set of constituencies that, for various ideological backgrounds and various motivations, could have all agreed that hey, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America finally after 20 years of politicians talking about it is maybe a good thing we want to sustain. Hey, lowering energy prices by building new energy supplies at a time when demand is growing, that’s a good idea, maybe we should sustain that, right? Creating tax bases in rural areas through investment in solar farms and wind farms — maybe that’s a good thing we should sustain.
Politics isn’t about getting everybody to agree on motivation, right? It’s about getting people to agree on what we’re going to do as a body politic. And unfortunately, that’s what I guess I’m getting at by this hyperpartisan, ideologically-driven world is, now it is all about getting everybody to agree on motivations, and —
Robinson Meyer: That’s what I was going to say. I actually think it’s —
Jenkins: And that’s just a terrible way to make policy. And I guess it makes this all that much harder.
Meyer: I think for me, I fear we’ve run the climate base experiment so well now that people have gotten this message, and people are starting to understand these policies in terms of energy affordability or clean energy policy. And that means lots of good things for clean energy. I think people should keep making the argument because it seems to me to be true that, for instance, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s termination of the wind and solar tax credits is going to mean bad things for American electricity customers. It’s going to raise rates.
But I do think that we should take the full lesson of the IRA experience and say, look, if people care about affordability and you tell them you’re working for affordability, you actually do need to put affordability at the center of your policies. And you need to be willing to understand that there is a tradeoff between affordability and emissions, but unfortunately, the electorate might care about affordability.
A chart showing last year's spike in blackouts from major weather events.EIA
