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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 appeal of next-generation nuclear technology is simple. Unlike the vast majority of existing reactors that use water, so-called fourth-generation units use coolants such as molten salt, liquid metal, or gases that can withstand intense heat such as helium. That allows the machines to reach and maintain the high temperatures necessary to decarbonize industrial processes, which currently only fossil fuels are able to reach.
But the execution requirements of these advanced reactors are complex, making skepticism easy to understand. While the U.S., Germany, and other countries experimented with fourth-generation reactors in earlier decades, there is only one commercial unit in operation today. That’s in China, arguably the leader in advanced nuclear, which hooked up a demonstration model of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to its grid two years ago, and just approved building another project in September.
Then there’s Japan, which has been operating its own high-temperature gas-cooled reactor for 27 years at a government research site in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 90 minutes north of Tokyo by train. Unlike China’s design, it’s not a commercial power reactor. Also unlike China’s design, it’s coming to America.
Heatmap has learned that ZettaJoule, an American-Japanese startup led by engineers who worked on that reactor, is now coming out of stealth and laying plans to build its first plant in Texas.
For months, the company has quietly staffed up its team of American and Japanese executives, including a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission official and a high-ranking ex-administrator from the industrial giant Mitsubishi. It’s now preparing to decamp from its initial home base in Rockville, Maryland, to the Lone Star State as it prepares to announce its debut project at an as-yet-unnamed university in Texas.
“We haven’t built a nuclear reactor in many, many decades, so you have only a handful of people who experienced the full cycle from design to operations,” Mitsuo Shimofuji, ZettaJoule’s chief executive, told me. “We need to complete this before they retire.”
That’s where the company sees its advantage over rivals in the race to build the West’s first commercial high-temperature gas reactor, such as Amazon-backed X-energy or Canada’s StarCore nuclear. ZettaJoule’s chief nuclear office, Kazuhiko Kunitomi, oversaw the construction of Japan’s research reactor in the 1990s. He’s considered Japan’s leading expert in high-temperature gas reactors.
“Our chief nuclear officer and some of our engineers are the only people in the Western world who have experience of the whole cycle from design to construction to operation of a high temperature gas reactor,” Shimofuji said.
Like X-energy’s reactor, ZettaJoule’s design is a small modular reactor. With a capacity of 30 megawatts of thermal output and 12 megawatts of electricity, the ZettaJoule reactor qualifies as a microreactor, a subcategory of SMR that includes anything 20 megawatts of electricity or less. Both companies’ reactors will also run on TRISO, a special kind of enriched uranium with cladding on each pellet that makes the fuel safer and more efficient at higher temperatures.
While X-energy’s debut project that Amazon is financing in Washington State is a nearly 1-gigawatt power station made up of at least a dozen of the American startup’s 80-megawatt reactors, ZettaJoule isn’t looking to generate electricity.
The first new reactor in Texas will be a research reactor, but the company’s focus is on producing heat. The reactor already working in Japan, which produces heat, demonstrates that the design can reach 950 degrees Celsius, roughly 25% higher than the operating temperature of China’s reactor.
The potential for use in industrial applications has begun to attract corporate partners. In a letter sent Monday to Ted Garrish, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy in charge of nuclear power — a copy of which I obtained — the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian oil goliath Aramco urged the Trump administration to support ZettaJoule, and said that it would “consider their application to our operations” as the technology matures. ZettaJoule is in talks with at least two other multinational corporations.
The first new reactor ZettaJoule builds won’t be identical to the unit in Japan, Shimofuji said.
“We are going to modernize this reactor together with the Japanese and U.S. engineering partners,” he said. “The research reactor is robust and solid, but it’s over-engineered. What we want to do is use the safety basis but to make it more economic and competitive.”
Once ZettaJoule proves its ability to build and operate a new unit in Texas, the company will start exporting the technology back to Japan. The microreactor will be its first product line.
“But in the future, we can scale up to 20 times bigger,” Shimofuji said. “We can do 600 megawatts thermal and 300 megawatts electric.”
Another benefit ZettaJoule can tap into is the sweeping deal President Donald Trump brokered with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in October, which included hundreds of billions of dollars for new reactors of varying sizes, including the large-scale Westinghouse AP1000. That included financing to build GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s 300-megawatt BWRX-300, one of the West’s leading third-generation SMRs, which uses a traditional water-cooled design.
Unlike that unit, however, ZettaJoule’s micro-reactor is not a first-of-a-kind technology, said Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF.
“It’s operated in Japan for a long, long time,” he told me. “So that second-of-a-kind is an attractive feature. Some of these companies have never operated a reactor. This one has done that.”
A similar dynamic almost played out with large-scale reactors more than two decades ago. In the late 1990s, Japanese developers built four of GE and Hitachi’s ABWR reactor, a large-scale unit with some of the key safety features that make the AP1000 stand out compared to its first- and second-generation predecessors. In the mid 2000s, the U.S. certified the design and planned to build a pair in South Texas. But the project never materialized, and America instead put its resources into Westinghouse’s design.
But the market is different today. Electricity demand is surging in the near term from data centers and in the long term from electrification of cars and industry. The need to curb fossil fuel consumption in the face of worsening climate change is more widely accepted than ever. And China’s growing dominance over nuclear energy has rattled officials from Tokyo to Washington.
“We need to deploy this as soon as possible to not lose the experienced people in Japan and the U.S.,” Shimofuji said. “In two or three years time, we will get a construction permit ideally. We are targeting the early 2030s.”
If every company publicly holding itself to that timeline is successful, the nuclear industry will be a crowded field. But as history shows, those with the experience to actually take a reactor from paper to concrete may have an advantage.
It’s now clear that 2026 will be big for American energy, but it’s going to be incredibly tense.
Over the past 365 days, we at The Fight have closely monitored numerous conflicts over siting and permitting for renewable energy and battery storage projects. As we’ve done so, the data center boom has come into full view, igniting a tinderbox of resentment over land use, local governance and, well, lots more. The future of the U.S. economy and the energy grid may well ride on the outcomes of the very same city council and board of commissioners meetings I’ve been reporting on every day. It’s a scary yet exciting prospect.
To bring us into the new year, I wanted to try something a little different. Readers ask me all the time for advice with questions like, What should I be thinking about right now? And, How do I get this community to support my project? Or my favorite: When will people finally just shut up and let us build things? To try and answer these questions and more, I wanted to give you the top five trends in energy development (and data centers) I’ll be watching next year.
1. The AI data center backlash is growing faster than you thought.
The best thing going for American renewable energy right now is the AI data center boom. But the backlash against developing these projects is spreading incredibly fast.
Do you remember last week when I told you about a national environmental group calling for data center moratoria across the country? On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a nationwide halt to data center construction until regulations are put in place. The next day, the Working Families Party – a progressive third party that fields candidates all over the country for all levels of government – called for its candidates to run in opposition to new data center construction.
On the other end of the political spectrum, major figures in the American right wing have become AI skeptics critical of the nascent data center buildout, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. These figures are clearly following the signals amidst the noise; I have watched in recent months as anti-data center fervor has spread across Facebook, with local community pages and groups once focused on solar and wind projects pivoting instead to focus on data centers in development near them.
In other words, I predicted just one month ago, an anti-data center political movement is forming across the country and quickly gaining steam (ironically aided by the internet and algorithms powered by server farms).
2. More data centers = lots more transmission fights.
I often hear from the clean energy sector that the data center boom will be a boon for new projects. Renewable energy is the fastest to scale and construct, the thinking goes, and therefore will be the quickest, easiest, and most cost effective way to meet the projected spike in energy demand.
I’m not convinced yet that this line of thinking is correct. But I’m definitely sure that no matter the fuel type, we can expect a lot more transmission development, and nothing sparks a land use fight more easily than new wires.
Past is prologue here. One must look no further than the years-long fight over the Piedmont Reliability Project, a proposed line that would connect a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to data centers in Virginia by crossing a large swathe of Maryland agricultural land. I’ve been covering it closely since we put the project in our inaugural list of the most at-risk projects, and the conflict is now a clear blueprint.
In Wisconsin, a billion-dollar transmission project is proving this thesis true. I highly recommend readers pay close attention to Port Washington, where the release of fresh transmission line routes for a massive new data center this week has aided an effort to recall the city’s mayor for supporting the project. And this isn’t even an interstate project like Piedmont.
3. The data center backlash is coming for renewable energy.
While I may not be sure of the renewable energy sector’s longer-term benefits from data center development, I’m far more confident that this Big Tech land use backlash is hitting projects right now.
The short-term issue for renewables developers is that opponents of data centers use arguments and tactics similar to those deployed by anti-solar and anti-wind advocates. Everyone fighting data centers is talking about ending development on farmland, avoiding changes to property values, stopping excess noise and water use, and halting irreparable changes to their ways of life.
Only one factor distinguishes data center fights from renewable energy fights: building the former potentially raises energy bills, while the latter will lower energy costs.
I do fear that as data center fights intensify nationwide, communities will not ban or hyper-regulate the server farms in particular, but rather will pass general bans that also block the energy projects that could potentially power them. Rural counties are already enacting moratoria on solar and wind in tandem with data centers – this is not new. But the problem will worsen as conflicts spread, and it will be incumbent upon the myriad environmentalists boosting data center opponents to not accidentally aid those fighting zero-carbon energy.
4. Trump will start slowly approving renewables.
This week, the Bureau of Land Management approved its first solar project in months: the Libra facility in Nevada. When this happened, I received a flood of enthusiastic and optimistic emails and texts from sources.
We do not yet know whether the Libra approval is a signal of a thaw inside the Trump administration. The Interior Department’s freeze on renewables permitting decisions continues mostly unabated, and I have seen nothing to indicate that more decisions like this are coming down the pike. What we do know is that ahead of a difficult midterm election, the Trump administration faces outsized pressure to do more to address “affordability,” Democrats plan to go after Republicans for effectively repealing the Inflation Reduction Act and halting permits for solar and wind projects, and there’s a grand bargain to be made in Congress over permitting reform that rides on an end to the permitting freeze.
I anticipate that ahead of the election and further permitting talks in Congress, the Trump administration will mildly ease its chokehold on solar and wind permits because that is the most logical option in front of them. I do not think this will change the circumstances for more than a small handful of projects sited on federal lands that were already deep in the permitting process when Trump took power.
5. Battery fire fears continue to spread after Moss Landing.
It’s impossible to conclude a conversation about next year’s project fights without ending on the theme that defined 2025: battery fire fears are ablaze, and they’ll only intensify as data centers demand excess energy storage capacity.
The January Moss Landing fire incident was a defining moment for an energy sector struggling to grapple with the effects of the Internet age. Despite bearing little resemblance to the litany of BESS proposals across the country, that one hunk of burning battery wreckage in California inspired countless communities nationwide to ban new battery storage outright.
There is no sign this trend will end any time soon. I expect data centers to only accelerate these concerns, as these facilities can also catch fire in ways that are challenging to address.
1. Hopkins County, Texas – A Dallas-area data center fight pitting developer Vistra against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has exploded into a full-blown political controversy as the power company now argues the project’s developer had an improper romance with a city official for the host community.
For those who weren’t around for the first go, here’s the low-down: The Dallas ex-urb of Sulphur Springs is welcoming a data center project proposed by a relatively new firm, MSB Global. But the land – a former coal plant site – is held by Vistra, which acquired the property in a deal intended for remediating the site. After the city approved the project, Vistra refused to allow construction on the land, so Sulphur Springs sued, and in its bid to win the case, the city received support from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, whose office then opened an antitrust investigation into the power company’s land holdings.
Since we first reported this news, the lawsuit has escalated. Vistra’s attorneys have requested Sulphur Springs’ attorney be removed from the court proceedings because, according to screenshots of lengthy social media posts submitted to the court, the city itself has confirmed that the attorney dated a senior executive for MSB Global as recently as the winter of 2024.
In a letter dated December 10, posted online by activists fighting the data center, Vistra’s attorneys now argue the relationship is what led to the data center coming to the city in the first place, and that the attorney cannot argue on behalf of the city because they’ll be a fact witness who may need to provide testimony in the case: “These allegations make awareness of negotiations surrounding the deed and the City’s subsequent conduct post-transaction, including any purported ‘reliance’ on Vistra Parties’ actions and omissions, relevant.”
I have not heard back from MSB Global or Sulphur Springs about this case, but if I do, you’ll be hearing about it.
2. La Plata County, Colorado – This county has just voted to extend its moratorium on battery energy storage facilities over fire fears.
The county is at odds with itself over whether to adopt battery storage property setbacks that align with national fire safety standards or ones that are more like those in place at the local level for oil and gas facilities, which are far larger and more onerous. It’s the first time I have ever seen battery storage siting policy recommendations aligned with treatment of the fossil fuel sector, a surprising comparison point.
La Plata’s moratorium will last through mid-January at which point the county will again vote on whether to adopt an ordinance regulating the sector or continue to halt development.
3. Dane County, Wisconsin – The city of Madison appears poised to ban data centers for at least a year.
Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway introduced the measure last week with near universal support from the city council. If adopted, the one-year moratorium would make the city one of the largest in the U.S. to ban new facilities outright, and it would be the first such move from a major city in Wisconsin.
There’s pressure for Madison to act because data centers are drawing up drama elsewhere in Dane County. This week, the village of DeForest rolled out a slower approval process for an annexation agreement sought by data center developer QTS for a massive facility I have been tracking, stating that “guardrails” need to be in place amidst rampant concern from nearby residents.
While Dane County certainly is a more liberal corner of the Badger State, Heatmap Pro data shows why this backlash is happening: The county has an especially high risk score driven by a white racial mix, higher income bracket, and a growing Trump-y voting bloc.
4. Goodhue County, Minnesota – The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, a large environmentalist organization in the state, is suing to block a data center project in the small city of Pine Island.
The Project Skyway data center, overseen by Ryan Companies, is not immediately affected by the lawsuit, but MCEA is seeking an injunction with a court date set in early February. The lawsuit argues that the project violates local zoning codes and therefore should be stopped until development is aligned with the regulations.
5. Hall County, Georgia – A data center has been stopped down South, at least for now.
Proposed outside of Atlanta, Project Turbo has received considerable opposition over water use because of its close proximity to a large lake, resulting in county officials halting any further consideration of the project indefinitely. In a bid to appease locals’ concerns, Project Turbo’s application for a special use permit has now been withdrawn, and the two men developing the data center now say they’ll pursue an industrial zoning permit, which requires more stringent environmental protections.
6. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The fight between Vineyard Wind and the town of Nantucket seems to be over.
The coastal town has reached an agreement with Vineyard Wind that resolves multiple outstanding issues after the infamous blade breakage sent fiberglass onto its tourist-heavy beaches. The agreement does not include many of the town’s requests, including an ask for payment that will not be met, but it does require the offshore wind project’s personnel to update the town every month about safety and operation.
