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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.
A specter is haunting permitting reform talks — the specter of regulatory uncertainty. That seemingly anodyne two-word term has become Beltway shorthand for President Donald Trump’s unrelenting campaign to rescind federal permits for offshore wind projects. The repeated failure of the administration’s anti-wind policies to hold up in court aside, the precedent the president is setting has spooked oil and gas executives, who warn that a future Democratic government could try to yank back fossil fuel projects’ permits.
A new bipartisan bill set to be introduced in the House Tuesday morning seeks to curb the executive branch’s power to claw back previously-granted permits, protecting energy projects of all kinds from whiplash every time the political winds change.
Dubbed the FREEDOM Act, the legislation — a copy of which Heatmap obtained exclusively — is the latest attempt by Congress to speed up construction of major energy and mining projects as the United States’ electricity demand rapidly eclipses new supply and Chinese export controls send the price of key critical minerals skyrocketing.
Two California Democrats, Representatives Josh Harder and Adam Gray, joined three Republicans, Representatives Mike Lawler of New York, Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, to sponsor the bill.
While green groups have criticized past proposals to reform federal permitting as a way to further entrench fossil fuels by allowing oil and gas to qualify for the new shortcuts, Harder pitched the bill as relief to ratepayers who “are facing soaring energy prices because we’ve made it too hard to build new energy projects.”
“The FREEDOM Act delivers the smart, pro-growth certainty that critical energy projects desperately need by cutting delays, fast-tracking approvals, and holding federal agencies accountable,” he told me in a statement. “This is a common sense solution that will mean more energy projects being brought online in the short term and lower energy costs for our families for the long run.”
The most significant clause in the 77-page proposal lands on page 59. The legislation prohibits federal agencies and officials from issuing “any order or directive terminating the construction or operation of a fully permitted project, revoke any permit or authorization for a fully permitted project, or take any other action to halt, suspend, delay, or terminate an authorized activity carried out to support a fully permitted project.”
There are, of course, exceptions. Permits could still be pulled if a project poses “a clear, immediate, and substantiated harm for which the federal order, directive, or action is required to prevent, mitigate, or repair.” But there must be “no other viable alternative.”
Such a law on the books would not have prevented the Trump administration from de-designating millions of acres of federal waters to offshore wind development, to pick just one example. But the legislation would explicitly bar Trump’s various attempts to halt individual projects with stop work orders. Even the sweeping order the Department of the Interior issued in December that tried to stop work on all offshore wind turbines currently under construction on the grounds of national security would have needed to prove that the administration exhausted all other avenues first before taking such a step.
Had the administration attempted something similar anyway, the legislation has a mechanism to compensate companies for the costs racked up by delays. The so-called De-Risking Compensation Fund, which the bill would establish at the Treasury Department, would kick in if the government revoked a permit, canceled a project, failed to meet deadlines set out in the law for timely responses to applications, or ran out the clock on a project such that it’s rendered commercially unviable.
The maximum payout is equal to the company’s capital contribution, with a $5 million minimum threshold, according to a fact-sheet summarizing the bill for other lawmakers who might consider joining as co-sponsors. “Claims cannot be denied based on project permits or energy technology type,” the document reads. A company that would have benefited from a payout, for example, would be TC Energy, the developer behind the Keystone XL oil pipeline the Biden administration canceled shortly after taking office.
Like other permitting reform legislation, the FREEDOM Act sets new rules to keep applications moving through the federal bureaucracy. Specifically, it gives courts the right to decide whether agencies that miss deadlines should have to pay for companies to hire qualified contractors to complete review work.
The FREEDOM Act also learned an important lesson from the SPEED Act, another bipartisan bill to overhaul federal permitting that passed the House in December but has since become mired in the Senate. The SPEED Act lost Democratic support — ultimately passing the House with just 11 Democratic votes — after far-right Republicans and opponents of offshore wind leveraged a special carveout to continue allowing the administration to commence its attacks on seaborne turbine projects.
The amendment was a poison pill. In the Senate, a trio of key Democrats pushing for permitting reform, Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Martin Heinrich, Environment and Public Works ranking member Sheldon Whitehouse, and Hawaii senator Brian Schatz, previously told Heatmap’s Jael Holzman that their support hinged on curbing Trump’s offshore wind blitz.
Those Senate Democrats “have made it clear that they expect protections against permitting abuses as part of this deal — the FREEDOM Act looks to provide that protection,” Thomas Hochman, the director of energy and infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, told me. A go-to policy expert on clearing permitting blockages for energy projects, Hochman and his center-right think tank have been in talks with the lawmakers who drafted the bill.
A handful of clean-energy trade groups I contacted did not get back to me before publication time. But American Clean Power, one of the industry’s dominant associations, withdrew its support for the SPEED Act after Republicans won their carveout. The FREEDOM Act would solve for that objection.
The proponents of the FREEDOM Act aim for the bill to restart the debate and potentially merge with parts of the previous legislation.
“The FREEDOM Act has all the critical elements you’d hope to see in a permitting certainty bill,” Hochman said. “It’s tech-neutral, it covers both fully permitted projects and projects still in the pipeline, and it provides for monetary compensation to help cover losses for developers who have been subject to permitting abuses.”
Debates over electricity policy usually have a common starting point: the “natural monopoly” of the transmission system, wherein the poles and wires that connect power plants to homes and businesses have exclusive franchises in a certain territory and charge regulated rates to access them.
The thinking is that without a monopoly franchise, no one would make the necessary capital expenditures to build and maintain the power lines and grid infrastructure necessary to connect the whole system, especially if they thought someone would build a new transmission line nearby. So while a government body oversees investment and prices, the utility itself is not subject to market-based competition.
But what if someone really did want to build their own wires?
“There are at least two of us who do not think that electricity is a natural monopoly,” Glen Lyons, the founder of Advocates for Consumer Regulated Electricity, told me.
The other one is Travis Fisher, an energy scholar at the Cato Institute, who corrected his friend and colleague.
“Between me, and Joseph Schumpeter, and Wayne Crews, and Glen Lyons, there’s at least four of us. Only three of us are alive,” Fisher said, referencing the Austrian economist Schumpeter, who died in 1950, and the libertarian scholar Crews, who was a critic of the restructuring of the electricity market in the 1990s.
Fisher and Lyons, however, are the team behind a proposal put out on Tuesday by the libertarian Cato Institute calling for “consumer-regulated electricity.” Instead of a transmission system with a monopoly franchise that independent generators can connect to and sell power to utilities in a process regulated by a combination of a public utility commission and regional transmission organization or independent system operators, CRE systems would be physically islanded electricity systems that customers would privately and voluntarily sign up for.
Crucially, CRE would not be regulated under existing federal law, and would have no connection to the existing grid, allowing for novel price structures and even physical set-ups, like running on different frequencies or even direct current, Fisher said.
They would also, Fisher and Lyons argue, help solve the dilemma haunting electricity policymakers: how to bring new load on the grid quickly without saddling existing ratepayers with the cost of paying for utility upgrades.
“If enabled, CRE utilities would generate, transmit, and sell electricity directly to customers under voluntary contracts, without interconnecting to the existing regulated grid or seeking permission from economic regulators at the state or federal level,” the Cato proposal reads.
This idea has a natural audience among political conservatives, as it’s essentially a bet that more entrepreneurship and less regulation will solve some of our biggest energy system problems. On the other hand, utilities tend to be a powerful force in conservative politics at both the state and federal levels, which is one reason why these kinds of ideas are still marginal.
But less marginal than they have been.
Consumer-regulated electricity is more than just another think tank white paper. It has also won the approval of the influential American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, a conservative group that writes model legislation for state legislatures to adopt. Fisher proposed version of the consumer-regulated utilities plan to the network in December of last year, and ALEC approved it in January.
A few days after the group finalized the model policy to allow CRE at the state level, Arkansas Senator Tom Cottonproposed his own version in the form of the DATA Act, which would “amend the Federal Power Act to exempt consumer-regulated electric utilities from Federal regulation.”
While the CRE proposal is a big conceptual departure from about a century of electricity regulation, the actual reform is modest. Fisher and Lyons propose a structure would apply solely to “sophisticated customers … who voluntarily contract for service and can manage their own risks,” i.e. big industrial users like data centers, not your home.
While this sounds like behind the meter generation, whereby large electricity users such as, say, xAI in Memphis, simply set up their own electricity plants, CRE goes further. The idea is to capture the self-regulation benefits of building your own power within a structure that still allows for the economies of scale of a grid. Or in the words of Cato’s proposal, CRE “would enable third-party utilities to serve many customers, resulting in lower costs, higher reliability, and a smaller environmental footprint compared to self-supply options.”
Fisher and Lyons argue that CRE would also have an advantage over so-called co-location, where data centers are built adjacent to generation and share interconnection with the grid, which still requires interacting with public utility commissions and utilities. The pair have also suggested that the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission use its existing rulemaking process on data center interconnection to encourage states to pass the necessary laws to allow islanded utility systems.
While allowing totally private utility systems may be a radical — and certainly a libertarian — departure from the utility regulation system as it exists today, proposals are popping up on both the left and the right to try to reduce utility influence over the electricity system.
Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire and climate investor who is running for governor of California, has said that he would “break up the utility monopolies to lower electric bills by 25%.” In a January press conference, Steyer clarified that he “wants to force utility companies to choose cheaper ways of wildfire-proofing their infrastructure and give customers other options for buying power, including making it easier to build neighborhood-level solar projects or allowing more communities to operate their own local grids,” according to CalMatters. California already has some degree of retail choice, although a more expansive version of a retail competition model infamously collapsed during the 2001 rolling blackouts.
To Fisher, while his and Lyons’ proposal is in some ways radical, it is also not a particularly big risk. If there’s truly no demand for private electricity networks, none will be built and nothing will change, even if there’s regulatory reform to allow for it.“I’m not surprised to see it get traction,” Fisher said of the plan, “just because there’s no downside, and the upside could be absolutely nothing — or it could be a breakthrough.”
Current conditions: Yet another snow storm is set to powder parts of the Ohio Valley and the Mid-Atlantic • Cyclone Fytia is deluging Madagascar, causing flooding that left at least three dead and 30,000 displaced in a country still reeling from the recent overthrow of its government • Scotland and England are bracing for a gusty 33-hour blizzard, during which temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump is starting a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile
He’s fashioned the military’s Defense Logistics Agency into a tool to fund mineral refineries. He’s gone on a shopping spree that made Biden administration officials “jealous,” taking strategic equity stakes in more than half a dozen mining companies. Now President Donald Trump is preparing to launch a strategic stockpile for critical minerals in what Bloomberg billed as “a bid to insulate manufacturers from supply shocks as the U.S. works to slash its reliance on Chinese rare earths and other metals.” Dubbed Project Vault, the venture will be seeded with a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and another $1.67 billion in private capital. More than a dozen companies have committed to work on the stockpile, including General Motors, Stellantis, Boeing, Google, and GE Vernova.
The shale industry, meanwhile, showed it’s matured enough to go through some consolidation. Oklahoma City-based gas giant Devon Energy is merging with Houston-headquartered Coterra Energy in an all-stock deal that CNBC said would create “a large-cap producer with a top position in the Permian Basin. The deal would establish a combined company with an enterprise value of $58 billion, marking the largest merger in the sector since Diamondback bought Endeavor Energy Resources for $26 billion in 2024. The deal comes as low prices from the global oil glut squeeze U.S. shale drillers — and as the possibility of more oil from Venezuela threatens the sector with fresh competition.
2. Trump notches his fifth straight legal loss on offshore wind
Offshore wind is now five-for-five in its legal brawls with Trump. With Orsted’s latest victory in the Sunrise Wind case on Monday, I’ll let Heatmap’s Jael Holzman serve as the ring announcer spelling out the stakes of the legal victory: “If the government were to somehow prevail in one or more of these cases, it would potentially allow agencies to shut down any construction project underway using even the vaguest of national security claims. But as I have previously explained, that behavior is often a textbook violation of federal administrative procedure law.”
3. Germany’s solar capacity is set to quadruple by 2045
Germany is set to quadruple its installed solar capacity to 425 gigawatts by 2045, according to a forecast from a trade group representing utilities and grid operators. The projections, Renewables Now reported, mean the country needs to expand its transmission system. Installed onshore wind capacity should triple to around 175 gigawatts by that same year. Battery storage is on track to rise about 68 gigawatts, from roughly 2 gigawatts today. Demand is also set to grow. Data centers, which make up just 2 gigawatts of demand on the grid today, are forecast to balloon to nearly 37 gigawatts in the next 19 years.
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4. China aims to ‘build a strong energy nation’
In northwestern China, a new 100-megawatt solar farm. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
In October, the Chinese Communist Party published the framework of its next Five-Year Plan, the 15th such industrial strategy. The National People’s Congress is set to formally approve the proposal next month. But on Monday, the energy analyst John Kemp called the latest five-word phrase, articulated in the form of “formal input” from the party’s Central Committee, “the most succinct statement of China’s energy policy.” Those words: “Building a strong energy nation.” The suggested edits from the committee described “accelerating the construction of a strong energy nation” as “extremely important and timely” and called its “main shortcomings” the ongoing reliance on imported oil and gas.
Unlike in the U.S., where the Trump administration is working to halt construction of renewables, the officials in Beijing boast that China’s “installed capacity of wind and solar has ranked first in the world for many consecutive years.” Like the U.S., the Central Committee pitched the plan as “an urgent requirement” for “gaining the initiative in great power competition.”
5. Japan steps up deep sea mining push
Japan is mounting a new push to implement a decade-old plan to extract rare earths from the ocean floor. A state-owned research vessel just completed a test mission to retrieve an initial sample of mineral-rich mud from a location 20,000 feet below the surface, the South China Morning Post reported. The government of Sanae Takaichi wants to start processing metal-bearing mud from the seabed for tests within a year. “It’s about economic security,” Shoichi Ishii, program director for Japan’s National Platform for Innovative Ocean Developments, told Bloomberg. “The country needs to secure a supply chain of rare earths. However expensive they may be, the industry needs them.”
With global negotiations over a licensing framework for legalizing deep sea mining in international waters has stalled, the U.S. just finalized a rule to speed up American permitting for the nascent sector, clearing the way for Washington to fulfill Trump’s pledge to go it alone if the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority didn’t act first.
THE KICKER
A week after signing an historic trade agreement with the European Union, India has inked another deal with the U.S. That means the world’s two largest consumer markets are now wide open to Indian industry, which relies heavily on coal. New Delhi isn’t just going to scrap all those coal-fired factories and forges. But the government’s latest budget earmarks about $2.4 billion over five years to speed up deployment of carbon capture equipment across heavy industry,Carbon Herald reported. The plan focuses on steel, cement, power, refining, and chemicals.
In northwestern China, a new 100-megawatt solar farm. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images