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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.
Key Senate Democrats are opposing a GOP-led permitting deal to overhaul federal environmental reviews without assurances that clean energy projects will be able to reap the benefits. Winning these lawmakers’ support will require major concessions to build new transmission infrastructure and greater permitting assistance for renewable energy projects.
In an exclusive joint statement provided Tuesday to Heatmap News, Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Martin Heinrich, Environment and Public Works ranking member Sheldon Whitehouse, and Hawaii senator Brian Schatz came out against passing the SPEED Act, a bill that would change the National Environmental Policy Act, citing concerns about how it would apply to renewable energy and transmission development priorities.
“We are committed to streamlining the permitting process — but only if it ensures we can build out transmission and cheap, clean energy. While the SPEED Act does not meet that standard, we will continue working to pass comprehensive permitting reform that takes real steps to bring down electricity costs,” the statement read.
As I wrote weeks ago, there’s very little chance the SPEED Act could become law without addressing Senate climate hawks’ longstanding policy preferences. Although the SPEED Act was voted out of committee in the House two weeks ago with support from a handful of Democratic lawmakers, it has yet to win support from even moderate energy wonks in that legislative body, including Representative Scott Peters, one of the Democratic House negotiators in bipartisan permitting talks. Peters told me he would need to see more assurances dealing with the renewables permitting freeze, for example, in order for him to support the bill.
Observers had initially expected a full House vote on the SPEED Act as soon as this week, but an additional hurdle arose in recent days in the form of opposition from House conservative Republicans, led by Representative Chip Roy. The congressman from Texas had requested additional federal actions targeting renewables projects in exchange for passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act. What followed was a set of directives from the Interior Department that all but halted federal solar and wind permitting. Roy’s frustration with the SPEED Act concerns a relatively milquetoast nod to renewables permitting problems that would block presidents from rescinding already issued permits. This upset appears to have delayed a vote on the bill in the House.
There’s an eerie familiarity to this moment: Almost exactly one year ago, the last major attempt at a permitting deal, authored by Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, died when then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to bring it up for a vote in the face of opposition from the House. Unlike the SPEED Act, that bill offered changes to transmission siting policy that even conservative estimates said would’ve hastened the pace of national decarbonization.
Having Schatz, Heinrich, and Whitehouse — the three most powerful climate hawks in Congress — throw their weight against the SPEED Act casts serious doubt on the prospects for that legislation becoming the permitting deal this Congress. It also exposes an intra-energy world conflict, as it appears to position these lawmakers in opposition to American Clean Power, an energy trade group that represents a swath of diversified energy companies and utilities, as well as solar, wind, and battery storage developers.
Last week, ACP joined with the American Petroleum Institute and gas pipeline advocacy organizations to urge Congress to pass the SPEED Act. In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, ACP and the fossil fuel industry trade groups said that the legislation “directly addresses” the challenges facing their interests and “represents meaningful bipartisan progress toward a more stable and dependable permitting framework.” The only reference to potential additions came in a single, vague line: “While the SPEED Act makes important progress, there are additional ways Congress can facilitate the development of reliable and affordable energy infrastructure as part of a broader permitting package.”
This letter was taken by some backers of the renewable energy industry to be an endorsement without concessions. It was also a surprise because just days earlier, American Clean Power responded to the bill’s passage with a vaguely supportive statement that declared “additional efforts” were needed for “transmission infrastructure,” without which “energy prices will spike and system reliability will be threatened.” (It’s worth noting that the committee behind the SPEED Act, House Natural Resources, has no authority over transmission siting. No other proposal has yet emerged from Republicans in that chamber for Republicans to address the issue, either.)
One of the renewables backers taken aback was Schatz, who took to X to sound off against the organization. “Congratulations to ‘American Clean Power’ for cutting a deal with the American Petroleum Institute, but to enact a law both the house and the Senate have to agree, and Senators are finding out about this for the first time,” Schatz wrote in a post, which Whitehouse retweeted from one of his official X accounts.
In a subsequent post, Schatz said: “I am not finding out about the bill’s existence for the first time, I am tracking it all very closely. I am finding out that ACP endorsed it as is without anything on transmission, for the first time.”
By contrast, the statement from the three senators aligns them with the Solar Energy Industries Association, which sent a letter from more than 140 solar companies to top congressional leaders requesting direct action to fix a bureaucratic freeze on permit-related activity that has already helped kill large projects, including Esmeralda 7, which was the largest solar mega-farm in the United States.
In its message to Congress, the trade association made plain that while the SPEED Act was a welcome form of permitting changes, it was nowhere close to dealing with Trumpian chicanery on the group’s priority list.
We’ll have more on this unfolding drama in the days to come.
What if we treated lithium like oil? A commodity so valuable to the functioning of the American economy that the U.S. government has to step in not only to make it available, but also to make sure its price stays in a “sweet spot” for production and consumption?
That was what industry stalwart Howard Klein, founder and chief executive of the advisory firm RK Equities, had in mind when he came up with his idea for a strategic lithium reserve, modeled on the existing Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Klein published a 10-page white paper on the idea Monday, outlining an expansive way to leverage private companies and capital markets to develop a non-Chinese lithium industry without the risk and concentrated expense of selecting specific projects and companies.
The lithium challenge, Klein and other industry analysts and executives have long said, is that China’s whip hand over the industry allows it to manipulate prices up and down in order to throttle non-Chinese production. When investment in lithium ramps up outside of China, Chinese production ramps up too, choking off future investment by crashing prices.
Recognizing the dangers stemming from dysfunction in the global lithium market constitutes a rare area of agreement between both parties in Washington and across the Biden and Trump administrations. Last year, a Biden State Department official told reporters that China “engage[s] in predatory pricing” and will “lower the price until competition disappears.”
A bipartisan investigation released last month by the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party found that “the PRC engaged in a whole‐of‐government effort to dominate global lithium production,” and that “starting in 2021, the PRC government engaged in a coordinated effort to artificially depress global lithium prices that had the effect of preventing the emergence of an America‐focused supply chain.”
Klein thinks he’s figured out a way to deal with this problem
“They manipulated and they crushed prices through oversupply to prevent us from having our own supply chains,” he told me.
It’s not just that China can keep prices low through overproduction, it’s also that the country’s enormous market power can make prices volatile, Klein said, which scares off private sector investment in mining and processing. “You have two years, up two years down, two years up, two years down,” he told me. “That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.
His proposal is to establish “a large, rules-based buffer of lithium carbonate — purchased when prices are depressed due to Chinese oversupply, and released during price spikes, shortages, or export restrictions.”
This reserve, he said, would be more than just a stockpile from which lithium could be released as needed. It would also help to shape the market for lithium, keeping prices roughly in the range of $20,000 per ton (when prices fall below that, the reserve would buy) and $40,000 to $50,000 per ton, when the reserve would sell. The idea is to keep the price of lithium carbonate — which can be processed as a material for batteries with a wide range of defense (e.g. drones) and transportation (e.g. electric vehicles) applications — within a range that’s reasonable for investors and businesses to plan around.
“Lithium has swung from like $6,000 [per ton] to $80,000, back down to $9,000, and now it’s at $11,000 or $12,000,” Klein told me. “But $11,000 or $12,000 is not a high enough price for a company to build a plan that’s going to take three to five years. They need $20,000 to $25,000 now as a minimum for them to make a $2 billion dollar investment.” When prices for lithium get up to “$50,000, $60,000, or $70,000, then it becomes a problem because battery makers can’t make money.”
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have taken more active steps to secure a U.S. or allied supply chain for valuable inputs, including rare earth metals. But Klein’s proposed reserve looks to balance government intervention with a diverse, private-sector led industry.
The reserve would be more broad-based than price floor schemes, where a major buyer like the Defense Department guarantees a minimum price for the output from a mine or refining facility. This is what the federal government did in its deal with MP Materials, the rare earths miner and refiner, which secured a multifaceted deal with the federal government earlier this year.
Klein estimates that the cost in the first year of the strategic lithium reserve could be a few billion dollars — on the scale of the nearly $2.3 billion loan provided by the Department of Energy for the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada, which also saw the federal government take an equity stake in the miner, Lithium Americas.
Ideally, Klein told me, “there’s a competition of projects that are being presented to prospective funders of those projects, and I want private market actors to decide, should we build more Thacker Passes or should we do the Smackover?” referring to a geologic formation centered in Arkansas with potentially millions of tons of lithium reserves.
Klein told me that he’s trying to circulate the proposal among industry and policy officials. His hoped is that as the government attempts to come up with a solution to Chinese dominance of the lithium industry, “people are talking about this idea and they’re saying, Oh, that’s actually a pretty good idea.”
Current conditions: After a two-inch dusting over the weekend, Virginia is bracing for up to 8 inches of snow • The Bulahdelah bushfire in New South Wales that killed a firefighter on Sunday is flaring up again • The death toll from South and Southeast Asia’s recent floods has crossed 1,750.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Federal judge rules Trump’s executive order banning wind energy illegal
The Block Island Wind Farm, North America's first offshore turbines.John Moore/Getty Images
President Donald Trump’s Day One executive order directing agencies to stop approving permitting for wind energy projects is illegal, a federal judge ruled Monday evening. In a 47-page ruling against the president in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Judge Patti B. Saris found that the states led by New York who sued the White House had “produced ample evidence demonstrating that they face ongoing or imminent injuries due to the Wind Order,” including project delays that “reduce or defer tax revenue and returns on the State Plaintiffs’ investments in wind energy developments.” The judge vacated the order entirely.
Trump’s “total war on wind” may have shocked the industry with its fury, but the ruling is a sign that momentum may be shifting. Wind developers have gathered unusual allies. As I wrote here in October, big oil companies balked at Trump’s treatment of the wind industry, warning the precedents Republican leaders set would be used by Democrats against fossil fuels in the future. Just last week, as I reported here, the National Petroleum Council advised the Department of Energy to back a national permitting reform proposal that would strip the White House of the power to rescind already-granted licenses.
2. Energy Department puts up $134 million for refining rare earths
Back in October, I told you about how the head of the world’s biggest metal trading house warned that the West was getting the critical mineral problem wrong, focusing too much on mining and not enough on refining. Now the Energy Department is making $134 million available to projects that demonstrate commercially viable ways of recovering and refining rare earths from mining waste, old electronics, and other discarded materials, Utility Dive reported. “We have these resources here at home, but years of complacency ceded America’s mining and industrial base to other nations,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement.
If you read yesterday’s newsletter, you may recall that the move comes as the Trump administration signals its plans to take more equity stakes in mining companies, following on the quasi-nationalization spree started over the summer when the U.S. military became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, the country’s only active rare earths miner, in a move Heatmap's Matthew Zeitlin noted made Biden-era officials jealous.
3. Google and NextEra partner on data centers
NextEra Energy is planning to develop data centers across the U.S. for Google-owner Alphabet as the utility giant pivots from its status as the nation’s biggest renewable power developer to the natural gas preferred by the Trump administration. The Florida-based company already had a deal to provide 2.5 gigawatts of clean energy capacity to Facebook-owner Meta Platforms, and also plans gas plants for oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. and gas producer Comstock Resources. Still, NextEra’s stock dropped by more than 3% as investors questioned whether the company’s skills with solar and wind can be translated to gas. “They’ve been top-notch, best-in-class renewable developers,” Morningstar analyst Andy Bischof told Bloomberg. “Now investors have to get their head around whether that can translate to best-in-class gas developer.”
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4. Another U.S. gas plant is getting carbon capture
In October, Google backed construction of the first U.S. commercial installation of a gas plant built from the ground up with carbon capture. The project, which Matthew wrote about here, had the trappings to work where other experiments in carbon capture failed. The location selected for the plant already had an ethanol facility with carbon capture, and access to wells to store the sequestered gas. Now the U.S. could have another plant. In a press release Monday, the industrial giant Babcock and Wilcox announced a deal with an unnamed company to supply carbon capture equipment to an existing U.S. power station. More details are due out in March 2026.
5. Fusion energy leaders meet with Energy Department
Executives from at least 14 fusion energy startups met with the Energy Department on Monday as the agency looks to spur construction of what could be the world’s first power plants to harness the reaction that powers the sun. The Trump administration has made fusion a priority, issuing a roadmap for commercialization and devoting a new office to the energy source, as I wrote in a breakdown of the agency’s internal reorganization last month. It is, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has written, “finally, possibly, almost time for fusion” as billions of dollars flow into startups promising to make the so-called energy source of tomorrow a reality in the near future. “It is now time to make an investment in resources to match the nation’s ambition,” the Fusion Industry Association, the trade group representing the nascent industry, wrote in a press release. “China and other strategic competitors are mobilizing billions to develop the technology and capture the fusion future. The United States has invested in fusion R&D for decades; now is the time to complete the final step to commercialize the technology.” Indeed, as I wrote last month, China has forged an alliance with roughly a dozen countries to work together on fusion, and it’s spending orders of magnitude more cash on the energy source than the U.S.
THE KICKER
Founded by a former Google worker, the startup Quilt set out to design chic-looking heat pumps sexy enough to serve as decor. Investors like the pitch. The company closed a $20 million Series B round on Monday, bringing its total fundraising to $64 million. “Our growth demonstrates that when you solve for comfort, design, and efficiency simultaneously, adoption accelerates,” Paul Lambert, chief executive and co-founder of Quilt, said in a statement. “This funding enables us to bring that experience to millions more North American homes.”
The Block Island Wind Farm, North America's first offshore turbines.John Moore/Getty Images