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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.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress
Georgia is arguably the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act economy. The state has been a magnet for manufacturing companies seeking to supply batteries, electric cars, and solar cells in order to capture the law’s generous tax credits for domestically built green technology.
While some of the power that supplies these facilities (not to mention data centers also flocking to the state) is clean — the only new U.S. nuclear reactors built this decade are in Georgia, and 38% of electricity generation for the state’s largest utility, Georgia Power, came from non-carbon-emitting sources in 2024 — the state is now planning to bolster its natural gas and coal fleets to support its enormous projected load growth.
Georgia Power released its 2025 Integrated Resource Plan on Friday, laying out to state regulators its forecasts for electricity demand and how it intends to bolster and adjust its fleet to meet the new usage. These exercises almost always feature eye-popping demand estimates and corrections and addendums to older plans to account for even more electricity growth than had been previously projected.
This time around, Georgia Power says it expects 8,200 megawatts of load growth through the end of 2030, which is already about 2,000 megawatts more than what it expected during its last planning exercise, when it updated its 2022 plan in 2023. To get a sense of the scale of this growth, the new Vogtle nuclear reactors have a little over 1,000 megawatts of capacity each. Together, they took 11 years and over $30 billion to build.
That new power won’t just be powering data centers. It will also run much of the green economy that the Biden administration tried to build up.
“New and expanding economic development projects in Georgia have progressed more rapidly and on a larger scale than in previous years,” Georgia Power said in its filing. “Growth in emerging industries such as electric transportation (‘ET’), data centers, and solar manufacturing have accelerated since 2021.”
The report also said that by the middle of last year, “the manufacturing sector led in both investment and job creation in Georgia, representing 53% of job growth and 54% of capital investment in the state.”
Hyundai opened a plant making electric SUVs outside of Savannah in 2024, while Kia makes electric SUVs near the Alabama border after making a $200 million investment in the plant. Also last year, the Korean solar company Qcells started making solar panels in Dalton, Georgia and other components in Cartersville; another Korean company, SK Group, has plants in Commerce that make batteries for Volkswagen and Ford. And in the final days of the Biden administration, Rivian got a $6.6 billion Energy Department loan for its planned plant between Atlanta and Athens.
One reason manufacturers come to Georgia is for the power, Tim Echols, the vice-chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, argued in an Atlanta Journal Constitution op-ed Thursday: “Southern Co. and Georgia Power have a reputation for reliability,” he wrote.
And for the foreseeable future that Georgia Power plans for, that means some of its most polluting and carbon-emitting power plants will stay open.
In the update to its previous IRP, Georgia Power extended the life of a coal plant operated by its sister utility Mississippi Power and proposed adding 1.4 gigawatts of generators that could run on natural gas or oil.
Compared to 2022, “the Company now projects capacity needs that necessitate both the extension of existing coal and gas-steam units along with the procurement of new capacity resources,” Georgia Power said in its IRP Friday.
Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, still has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, but said in the filling that “the feasibility of continued progress toward a low-carbon future, including a net-zero future, is highly dependent on the continued use of natural gas and continued technological advancements that will facilitate a reliable and economic low-carbon electricity supply.”
The utility also wants to upgrade existing gas-fueled and hydroelectric plants, as well as acquire an additional 1,100 megawatts of new renewables, adding up to 4,000 megawatts of procurements. Georgia Power’s previous update to its 2022 IRP called for the construction of new oil and gas plants, which were approved by regulators last year.
"Georgia Power's 2025 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) includes adding up to 4,000 megawatts of new renewable energy resources by 2035, including 1,000 MW by 2032, and more than 1,000 miles of new transmission lines. Clean energy resources and transmission solutions are vital to reducing customer costs and maintaining the high level of reliability Georgians have grown accustomed to,” Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association, said in a statement.
Donald Trump reemphasized on Friday that he intends to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico beginning February 1, and while that date is rapidly approaching, the details remain sparse. Although the president has suggested the duties will be sweeping, covering everything from cars to lumber to oil, their impact on one key commodity — electricity — is very much in question.
The U.S. imports thousands of gigawatts of electricity from Canada every year, worth in the billions of dollars. While electricity from Canada makes up less than 1% of our nationwide power consumption, it’s a significant and growing source of low-cost, low-carbon power for some regions, especially the Northeast. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has threatened to cut off power exports into the U.S. entirely in retaliation for the tariffs. But even if he doesn’t, if the tariffs apply to electricity imports, then power flows across the border would still likely decline. That’s because domestic natural gas-fired power would suddenly become much more economical.
“Electricity from Canada competes against natural gas power plants,” Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor at the University of Montreal’s business school who studies electricity markets, told me. “The gas power plants would be so happy to have these tariffs.”
But whether the tariffs would or could apply to the trade of electricity is still a big open question. While it would be technically and administratively feasible to tax imports of electricity, Pineau told me, there’s no system set up to do that right now. “Electricity doesn’t go through customs,” he said.
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The U.S. International Trade Commission, the federal agency that advises on international trade and tariffs, told me it was not “able to speculate on tariffs being applied to electricity or how that would be done.” The public affairs officer sent me a report from the Commission, however, which confirmed that it would be unprecedented. It states that “imports of electrical energy are not considered to be subject to the tariff laws of the United States.”
Regardless, officials in Maine and Massachusetts began warning about the impacts of potential tariffs on electricity last week. Governor of Massachusetts Maura Healey told business leaders that tariffs could increase electricity costs by $100 million to $200 million statewide, as approximately 5% to 10% of the electricity New England consumes comes from Canada. (I reached out to the Independent System Operator for New England, but the grid operator had no more clarity on whether or how tariffs on power imports would work. “We do not have expertise in international trade, and we’d be looking for guidance if or when a tariff is implemented. Beyond that, we’re not able to speculate at this time.”)
The U.S. generally imports electricity from Canada in two different ways. Some of it is part of a “firm contract.” For example, the New York grid operator has a contract with Hydro-Quebec, a Canadian hydropower company, through 2030, to import up to 900 megawatts of capacity at a fixed rate. Hydro-Quebec also has an agreement with Vermont to supply about 25% of its annual electricity needs through 2038. John-Thomas Bernard, an energy economist at the University of Ottawa, told me that for those contracts, if the 25% tax applied, it would be passed directly onto customers.
But most of the electricity the U.S. consumes from Canada is purchased in a daily or hourly market, where U.S. grid operators just buy whatever is cheapest. Tariffs would essentially force Canadian producers out of that market, Bernard said. “The bulk of what would have to be replaced on the U.S. side will come from gas.”
Whether this would produce a noticeable cost increase for consumers would largely depend on the price of natural gas. In 2023, imports to New York from Quebec dropped precipitously because a drought reduced hydropower capacity, but natural gas prices were also especially low, so electricity prices were not significantly higher.
Low natural gas prices are not guaranteed in the long term, of course. “Natural gas prices are very market driven, and the more we are reliant on natural gas in the northeast, the more demand you put on that supply, the more those prices are going to go up,” Daniel Sosland, president of the New England-based environmental nonprofit the Acadia Center, told me.
And if the tariffs remained in effect in 2026, New Yorkers would be hit much harder. That’s when the Champlain Hudson Power Express, a power line that will deliver 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower into New York City, is expected to be completed. The line will supply some 20% of New York City’s electricity demand.
“I don’t know what the point of all this is,” Sosland told me. Electricity trade between the U.S. and Canada brings mutual benefits, he said. “The idea of tariffs and trying to create a fence along the system is going to be very destructive to customer cost, to clean air, to power reliability, because it’s going to foreclose all these other options that are on the table right now that provide benefits on both sides.”
The exception to all of this is a small population of about 58,000 ratepayers in the state of Maine who live near the border and get virtually all of their electricity from New Brunswick, Canada. William Harwood, the public advocate for Maine, estimates these communities could see an increase of $6 to $7 per month on their electricity bills. Harwood didn’t have any additional insight into whether the tariffs would or could apply to electricity — he was merely looking into the impacts on constituents if they did. “They are electrically part of Canada,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s continued emphasis that tariffs will begin February 1.
Current conditions: Flowers are blooming in Moscow as parts of Russia experience unseasonally warm weather • The UK is being battered by yet another storm after Éowyn and Herminia brought back-to-back flooding events • An atmospheric river is expected to soak Northern California this weekend.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Burgum confirmed as Interior secretary
The Cabinet confirmations continue. Doug Burgum was confirmed yesterday as the new secretary of the Interior Department, where he will be in charge of executing President Trump’s plans to “drill, baby, drill.” He’ll also oversee the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Land Management. One of his first priorities will be to carry out the president’s executive order pausing new offshore wind leasing and permitting. During his confirmation hearings, Burgum suggested that “clean coal” could help with decarbonization, backed up Trump’s disdain for wind power, and dodged questions seeking reassurance about his commitment to protecting federal lands. More than half of the Senate Democrats voted for Burgum’s confirmation.
President Trump is reportedly considering ways to cancel New York City’s congestion pricing. The tolling program – the first in the nation – came into effect in early January and has produced “undeniably positive results,” according to Janno Lieber, CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It has prevented some 1 million vehicles from entering lower Manhattan, significantly reduced congestion and commuting times, and made bus services more efficient. Weekday ridership on some bus routes has increased by nearly 15%, and subway ridership has grown by 7.3%. “Better bus service, faster drive times, and safer streets are good for all New Yorkers,” Lieber said.
MTA
3. DOT moves to eliminate ‘climate change’ policies
The Department of Transportation this week moved to carry out some of President Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating all Biden-era policies that “reference or relate in any way” to climate change, “greenhouse gas” emissions (quotes are theirs), and environmental justice. A memorandum from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gave all administrations and agencies operating under DOT purview 10 days to produce a written report listing any policies relating to these climate issues and then another 10 days to terminate those policies. Duffy’s order also canceled a 2023 DOT policy that required all agencies to consider climate change adaptation and resilience in planning. The DOT employs 55,000 people across various bureaus including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, and many others.
4. Orsted ousts Mads Nipper as CEO
Mads Nipper is out as CEO of the world’s largest offshore wind developer. Orsted is replacing Nipper tomorrow with the company’s current deputy chief executive and chief commercial officer, Rasmus Errboe. The decision comes just 10 days after Orsted announced a $1.7 billion write-down in the U.S., which it blamed on challenging economic conditions like high interest rates and general uncertainty about the offshore wind industry. Nipper’s departure isn’t all that surprising – he held on after the company announced huge impairments from abandoning some U.S. projects in 2023. The latest write-downs were the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” one source told the Financial Times. In a statement, Errboe acknowledged the “headwinds” facing the industry, and said “offshore wind remains crucial for the green transition, and we’re deeply committed to pursuing our vision of a world that runs entirely on green energy.”
5. World invested $2 trillion in energy transition last year
More than $2 trillion was invested in the global energy transition last year, according to BloombergNEF’s annual energy Transition Investment Trends report. That’s 11% more than was spent in 2023, and a new record. But … investment growth seems to be slowing, and it still falls short of the $5.6 trillion that experts say will be needed each year between now and 2030 to have a shot at reaching net zero by 2050. The report contains lots of interesting statistics. For example:
Decarbonizing transportation received the largest amount of investment at $757 billion. Renewable energy came in second at $728 billion, followed by power grids at $390 billion.
Investment in “emerging tech” like carbon capture, hydrogen, nuclear, and clean shipping fell by 23%, while investment in “proven, commercially scalable” technologies grew by nearly 15% “despite hindrance from policy decisions, higher interest rates and expected slower consumer purchasing.”
About 60% of the total investment in the supply chain went to batteries.
Climate tech fundraising was down 40% year-over-year.
THE KICKER
“If Trump makes good on his threats to tariff oil imports from Canada and Mexico, then he will cost the American oil and gas industry tens of billions of dollars while causing gasoline prices to rise across much of the country.”
MTA