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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.
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The blue wave has officially reached the Arizona down ballot. Though two Democratic wins in the Arizona Corporation Commissioner race might not drum up the same national coverage as, say, flipping a Senate seat in South Carolina, the election of Clara Pratte and Jonathon Hill to the five-seat commission could have major energy implications in a state that already saw renewables champions take over the state’s largest utility earlier this year. (With close margins in slow-to-count Arizona, the ACC race wasn’t officially called until Thursday evening, when both Republicans conceded.)
Arizona is one of 10 states that elects its utility commissioners, with the ACC regulating private water, gas, and electric companies in the state. That includes overseeing Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power, where bills have increased 52% and 10%, respectively, over the past five years, per Heatmap’s data. (The publicly owned Salt River Project, which serves much of the Phoenix area, operates largely without ACC oversight.)
The ACC has been wholly in Republican hands since 2024; during that time, the body repealed Arizona’s Electric Efficiency Standards, which had incentivized utilities to pursue energy efficiency programs, as well as the state’s Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff, which supported the build-out of solar and wind power. “They were a rubber stamp for all our utilities and refused to even consider anything in support of protecting our climate,” Arizona State Representative Brian Garcia, who was reelected on Tuesday, said during a press call with Lead Locally this week. “At one instant, one of the commissioners told someone who got sick from the heat — who turned off their power and their AC — ‘Well, that’s on them.’ And I think our state and our communities have had enough of that.”
Though the ACC remains under Republican control despite the two Democratic additions, it puts full control within a one-seat striking distance for progressives when the other three seats are up in 2028 — a much easier fight to win, and potentially a huge one, given that the party hasn’t controlled the ACC since 1997.
Of particular concern in 2026, though, was the development of data centers. Ralph Heap, a Republican in the race who made the League of Conservation Voters’ 12-person “worst of the worst” list out of all 6,342 seats up for grabs nationwide on Tuesday, previously told the Arizona Capitol Times he supports the data center build-out in the name of American AI dominance. Incumbent Republican Kevin Thompson, meanwhile, has argued that the commission “has done its job of shielding ratepayers from costs associated with servicing data centers and other large load users.”
Voters evidently disagreed, backing Hill and Pratte, who say they support a data center moratorium. “The Corporation Commission might not be able to implement a pause, but I think they can certainly be a clearinghouse for information,” Hill told Yellow Sheet Report, an Arizona political tipsheet, acknowledging the relatively limited role the ACC actually has in regulating data centers beyond demanding transparency of utilities’ energy service agreements.
There are other concerns, too. Climate organizers zeroed in on the ACC race because of its influence over the solar buildout in the nation’s sunniest state, where nevertheless six of the state’s 15 counties have a restrictive ordinance against the resource, Heatmap Pro data shows. Commissioner-elect Pratte, a member of the Navajo Nation and the first Indigenous person elected to statewide office in Arizona, is also the co-founder of Navajo Power, a clean-energy company that helps tribal nations develop solar energy and storage projects.
Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power also both have pending rate increase requests under review by the ACC; a 14% rate increase for residential customers and a 45% or more increase for data centers in the case of APS, and a 10% increase for residential customers in the case of TEP. (The APS’ rate case will likely be decided in December, before Pratte and Hill take their seats.)
Additionally, State Senator Lauren Kuby has introduced a bill to change the name of the ACC to the Arizona Public Utility Commission, a move intended to highlight to voters “its significance to their daily lives,” as she told the Arizona Capitol Times earlier this year. Sure enough, John Qua, the campaign director at Lead Locally, and Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, previously told my colleague Matthew Zeitlin that part of the trouble with supporting progressive candidates in the ACC race was communicating to Arizona voters that, like the race for governor, it is a partisan election.
But given how things turned out Tuesday nationwide — a referendum on cost-of-living and, perhaps, data centers — it seems they needn’t have worried. Arizonans worked out exactly who to blame.
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I’m still wrapping my head around the size and scale of the Democratic victory on Tuesday. I suspect Wall Street is, too. Yesterday, the S&P 500 gained about 1.6% as investors saw an upside in the Democratic blow-out. Today, they lost their nerve: The S&P fell almost 4.4%, and the tech-focused Nasdaq slid by more than 5%. That AI-loaded index is now down more than 10% from its all-time high in October, which means it’s technically entered a “correction.” (If it drops by 20%, it’ll be in a bear market.)
Amid the market carnage, utilities have held out alright. The Vanguard utilities index fell by less than one percent today, and two of the country’s biggest vertically integrated electricity monopolies — Duke and Southern Company — actually gained ground. Other power companies — including Xcel Energy, which serves the Midwest and Dominion Energy in the Southeast — did okay as well.
I find that surprising, because utilities strike me as one of the biggest losers of Tuesday’s election.
That’s partly because utilities showed up in surprisingly specific ways in candidate policy proposals this cycle. Last night, I wrote about how Senate Democratic candidates took a fairly moderate tack on climate and energy policy this year. What I didn’t mention is that Adam Hamilton, Kansas’ newly elected Democratic senator, called out utilities specifically in his proposal for major new transmission. One of his four big energy policy proposals is as follows:
Require competitive bidding processes for transmission projects instead of handing utility companies lucrative contracts at taxpayer expense. When a nearly half-billion-dollar transmission project is handed to a single utility with no competitive bidding, Kansas ratepayers can end up paying far more than they should. Competitive bidding has been shown to cut these costs by twenty to thirty percent. Politicians on both sides of the aisle should speak out against harmful policies that avoid competitive bidding, like the $493 million project that was handed to Evergy.
I mean, sounds great to me, but transmission policy does not normally rank among Democrats’ biggest applause lines. Hamilton’s other energy ideas are far more conventional, including ending Trump’s tariffs, his war on domestic energy projects, and restoring the clean energy tax credits.
Hamilton wasn’t alone in targeting utilities. David Pomerantz, who leads the watchdogging Energy and Policy Institute, has a great blog post today looking at utility politics in the 2026 election. He argues that we’re about to see utilities endure a much tougher oversight regime than they’ve faced in decades.
Why? There was much more attention on public utility regulators in this election than there have been in previous ones, he argues. Historically, public utility commission appointments have been sleepy affairs. But “incoming new governors Amy Acton (Ohio), Jocelyn Benson (Michigan), David Crowley (Wisconsin), Aaron Ford (Nevada), and Hannah Pingree (Maine) all campaigned overtly on a promise to appoint commissioners who would put ratepayers first,” he writes. In a few of those gubernatorial races, the losing Republican candidate had also promised to fire or replace the existing utility commissioners.
It goes beyond just oversight. The incoming governors in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Maine have all vowed to reform or lower utility profits. Democrats won a majority on Georgia’s public utility commission — and flipped two seats in Arizona’s five-person board — promising to look closely at the utility profit structure, too.
In one state, voters even directly intervened to limit utility action. Michigan’s Proposition 2, which bars regulated utilities from making campaign contributions, passed overwhelmingly with more than 80% of the vote (although it now faces a legal challenge). And more than 100 politicians, including the winning Benson, pledged not to take utility campaign contributions.
Anyway, it’s an interesting post. You might remember I spoke to David last week for Shift Key about how the bipartisan permitting legislation would weaken monopoly utilities. As my colleagues Jael Holzman and Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, Democrats and Republicans are now negotiating a top-down amendment to that permitting package. We’ll soon learn if the new version — which could come out any time in the next two weeks — preserves the same tough-on-utilities provisions that Dave praised.
When it comes to energy and data centers, everyone loves Texas. Its pro-business political consensus, unusually deregulated electricity market, wide-open plains, sunny skies, and large natural gas and oil deposits have attracted data center developers, renewables developers, liquefied natural gas export terminals, and battery storage entrepreneurs alike.
But this all happened under decades of unified Republican control of Texas’ government. That’s ending on January 19, when Gina Hinojosa is sworn in as governor alongside every other holder of statewide elected office who won this year. In Austin, they will join a Democratic majority Texas House of Representatives, which has been under Republican control since 2003.
Immediately following the election, stocks linked to data center development in Texas swooned — Elon Musk’s SpaceX is down 12.5% since Tuesday, data center developer CoreWeave is down almost 19%, Oracle is down 9%, Texas-based independent power producer Vistra is down 19%. Sterling Infrastructure,a civil construction company headquartered outside Houston, has seen its shares fall 32%.
On the campaign trail, Hinojosa called for a moratorium on data centers until the legislature could pass legislation putting guardrails around development, including protecting residential ratepayers from electricity price hikes and giving local communities more leeway to restrict and condition development. Two weeks before election day, she released a video criticizing Governor Greg Abbott’s “Batch Zero” review process — which had been broadly characterized as a “pause” when it was announced over the summer — for allowing new permits, and she said that she would issue a “ban” on all data center approvals until new laws could be passed.
When Abbott introduced his pause over the summer, Texas’s electricity market ERCOT had474 gigawatts of data center interconnection requests in its queue (almost all from data centers), a figure he said was around five times the electricity market’s peak demand. That review is due to end next month, shortly before Hinojosa is due to take office, leaving little time for new projects to get approved before the moratorium goes into effect.
Some observers and investors took a sanguine view of Hinojosa’s data center policies. Gavin Baker, a longtime investor in SpaceX,said on X that Hinojosa’s policies “sound reasonable” andpointed to an interview she gave saying that the moratorium would be on new permits and would not affect the pipeline of permitted projects.
The data center and energy industry, however, is in wait-and-see mode when it comes to the severity of the moratorium.
“If she was thinking of trying to go after projects that had begun the construction process,” Brandt Vermillion, U.S. research lead at Modo Energy, said, “I think it would change the overall outlook a ton.”
According to Modo Energy analysis, there are some 25 gigawatts worth of projects under construction in Texas, another 4.6 gigawatts permitted, and another 90 gigawatts that are either just announced or have only submitted grid studies. If Hinojosa “is only going after non-permitted projects,” Vermillion added, then anyone thinking about the future path of data center development in Texas should be more concerned about supply chain constraints like obtaining enough chips to power the data centers.
That being said, the Texas legislature’s session doesn’t end until May 2027, meaning that Hinojosa’s pause could last several months before lawmakers put guardrails into law.
“I don’t think we’re going to not build another data center in the state,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “But I think that they’re going to be under quite a bit more scrutiny.”
That being said, analysts are now much more uncertain about the future path of electricity demand in the state. “Texas demand is difficult to project after Gina Hinojosa’s surprise win,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients on Thursday.
“Batteries and energy storage have been counting on demand to go up because they’re having a rough time out there right now in terms of revenues,” Rhodes said. “Demand will have a pretty big impact on supply.”
One thing the battery storage industry, as well as solar and wind developers, can cheer is that Democratic control of the governorship and the state House means that the threat of anti-renewables bills has fallen to essentially zero.
The renewables industry is hoping that data center development does continue in Texas, but that it looks more orderly and grid-connected.
Going forward, Vermillion expects that data center developers will have a harder time getting tax abatements, which means that a “well-capitalized hyperscaler” could potentially still pursue projects.
“Project A that was going to go about development in a certain way of seeking tax abatements and buying a bunch of reciprocating engines and trying to run themselves off grid” is much less likely to be able to go forward in Hinojosa’s Texas, Vermillion told me, especially as she is able to appoint new commissioners to the Texas Public Utility Commission or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Tim Woodruff, the data center lead at Modo, told me similarly. “In the near term, if you're one of the neo clouds, maybe now you start pushing a little harder on your projects that you have in MISO or in CAISO,” he said.
