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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.
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk need sign-off from fewer than a dozen board members to commit their companies to multibillion-dollar moves. The power plants that supply their data centers need sign-off from 13 states (plus D.C.), thousands of generators, millions of customers, and a federal regulator whose ratemaking standard predates the personal computer in order to build anything new.
Everyone in tech knows about the CEOs of the foundational artificial intelligence labs. Only energy nerds know the names of the people running our grid operators. That anonymity is a feature, not a bug. Grid operators generally think in decades, not years. But right now, they’re telling the U.S. that it has years, not decades, to figure out its own new path forward.
For decades, this process sufficed for energy generators (and regulators) grown accustomed to gradual, predictable load growth. But over the past several years, the scale and speed of increasing energy demand has overwhelmed the supply -side’s ability to respond. The resulting strain on the grid has reverberated through every rung of the supply chain, delaying development timelines, increasing costs, and elevating energy from political conversations to dinner table discussions.
The loudest creaks and groans are coming from PJM Interconnection, North America’s largest grid operator. Residential bills in the PJM service area are climbing at a dizzying pace. Recent capacity auctions have ended with record prices, which PJM’s own market monitor blames on the explosive growth in data center power demand. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has attempted to pressure PJM to lower its capacity price cap. Even Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has called on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to develop new procedures to help get data centers online faster.
David Mills, PJM’s CEO, published a 70-page report in May acknowledging that current market rules cannot keep pace with AI-driven load growth. And yet he also refused to recommend a path forward, leaving the decision to “state regulators and legislatures, to FERC, to consumers.”
The most essential grid infrastructure, he explained, “is not a price curve or a performance obligation — it is legitimacy.” In other words, what’s broken isn’t a parameter inside the capacity market, but rather the capacity market itself, along with the political conditions under which it operates. PJM calls this the “credibility trap”: high prices accurately signal that new investment is needed, but when those prices become politically untenable, government intervenes and investment stalls.
The fix, Mills writes, “requires structural choices, not just parameter adjustments.”
Mills is speaking to a deeper issue with the grid than its ability to respond to shifting market dynamics, which is that hyperscalers and grid operators are built to solve two different kinds of problems. Hyperscalers solve engineering problems with specifiable objectives, known constraints, verifiable outcomes. Engineering problems reward concentrated authority and unilateral decision-making.
Grid operators, on the other hand, solve coordination problems. The information they rely on to do so is dispersed across millions of stakeholders, continuously revised and often contradictory, and operators’ preferences are not so much known as they are revealed through deliberation. FERC’s standard for wholesale rates is not whether those rates are objectively “correct,” but rather whether the market settled on those rates through fair competition. The process does not just determine the answer, it essentially is the answer.
This construction is the category error driving the current AI-grid collision. The electricity grid is not an engineering problem with coordination problems attached. It is a coordination problem with engineering problems embedded in it. Treat it as the former and you lose all the information that gets generated in the process of market-based price discovery. You also lose all the buy-in that occurs when real people are faced with real trade-offs and have to make hard, binding choices.
Path A uses long-term contracts to limit price shocks but also locks customers into yesterday’s prices when the market falls. The price signal remains but is muted, and decision-making shifts to the utilities and state commissions.
Path B formalizes what already happens on a de facto basis when the system is short and load must be shed: some customers’ service gets cut before others’. Currently, the order in which customers lose service is a byproduct of the physics and architecture of the grid. Going forward, curtailment priority could be an attribute that is competitively priced. This path is the most politically volatile.
Path C takes the opposite approach — increase the real-time scarcity price signal and reduce the administrative overhead of the capacity market. While total electricity costs would not increase, price spikes (and general consternation) would. But the burden for covering those spikes would shift to load-serving entities, shielding ratepayers.
These pathways are not equivalent — unlike with an engineering problem, there are no cut-and-dried solutions here. There are only trade-offs and questions about who bears their consequences. Path C is likely the better answer, while Path A is more expedient. The gap between them is the work PJM’s constituents have to manage over the coming years. PJM may choose the wrong path, or arrive at the right one too late.
The alternative is not hypothetical. If hyperscalers aren’t willing to wait for PJM customers to decide which path they want to take (and recent history suggests they are not) they will build behind-the-meter generation, signbespokedeals with regulated utilities, and restart dormant nuclear plants. America would be left with two grids, one for compute, one for everything else. The first will be reliable and expensive. The second will be cheaper, fragile, and stranded with the costs of the system the first walked away from. The market would lose the dispatch signal, the error-correcting price mechanism, and the legitimacy of the system that has reliably powered the Mid-Atlantic for two decades.
Economist Friedrich Hayek described the limits of humans’ planning capabilities better than anyone in his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, using the metaphor of the craftsman shaping his handiwork versus the gardener cultivating growth. The craftsman thinks they can make a perfect tool but repeatedly runs up against the boundaries of their own knowledge, whereas the gardener learns to manage new information as it arises, tending not to the product itself but rather to the conditions that produce it.
Hyperscalers are not bad actors. They have legitimate interests and the political capital to help shape the grid’s future. But we should resist the Newtonian urge to meet unexpected, swiftly moving demand with equally swift supply. Markets and physical systems both tend toward equilibrium, but the former finds it through deliberation, not collision. Instead of trying to unilaterally craft a better grid, hyperscalers might find a better path if they work with the practitioners who already know how to garden.
Current conditions: A sprawling heat dome stretching from the Midwest to the East Coast is raising temperatures for more than 200 million Americans upward of 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week • Three firefighters died battling wildfires along the Colorado-Utah border on Saturday, while winds fanned the flames of the Cottonwood Fire in southwest Utah into the largest blaze in the U.S. right now • Back-to-back tropical storms Mekkhala and Higos battered Japan’s coast over the weekend, leaving at least one dead in a landslide.
THE TOP FIVE
1. The U.S. isn’t the only country losing offshore wind developers
For much of the past decade, Japan looked primed for offshore wind development for the same reasons the American industry first took root in the Northeast: It’s coastal, densely populated, and — with its nuclear power stations either shut down or idled — it’s more reliant on fossil fuels that it doesn’t locally produce than ever before. But building turbines off Japan’s shores has proven tricky as project costs ballooned. On Friday, Norway’s Equinor announced its decision to close its offshore wind division in Japan, after failing to win any leases at repeated auctions over the past eight years. “This decision reflects a reassessment of Equinor’s strategic direction, with a strengthened focus on integrated power markets,” the company said in a statement on its Japanese website.
The move comes two years after Denmark’s Orsted exited Japan. Last August, a consortium led by the industrial giant Mitsubishi pulled out of Japan’s first three offshore wind projects citing what Reuters described as concerns of surging costs. Last October, as I told you at the time, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi postponed a key procedural step for setting government funding levels for offshore wind projects. Instead, as you may recall, Takaichi has put a heavy focus on restarting the nuclear reactors mothballed after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and even expanding the fleet.
Scaling the capacity of ports like this to handle ore isn’t the only challenge.Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
For much of the 20th century, the geopolitical relevance of the world’s largest island stemmed from its central location as a kind of poker table situated right where Washington, Brussels, and Moscow meet. More recently, it’s been about Greenland’s untapped mineral riches. As polar ice recedes, the autonomous Danish territory has opened previously inaccessible deposits of rare earths and copper to prospecting. For Greenland, whose population of fewer than 60,000 is roughly 85% Indigenous, mining has offered an opportunity to diversify its economy beyond just fishing, augmenting an expanding tourism sector with some heavy industry. In 2017, when I visited local political officials in Nuuk, the capital, sustainability-minded liberals pined for an alternative development approach that took advantage of Greenland’s unique and pristine wilderness to, for example, build out a biomedical industry that draws upon research into the survival traits that allow life to thrive in harsh polar environments. At the time, the populists pitching industrialism as a fast track to independence seemed, to me at least, destined to win the argument. But the green techno-optimists may yet get the chance to prove their approach.
Last week, regulators in Nuuk formally rejected an Australian mining company’s bid to renew its exploration license for one of the most advanced rare earths projects in Greenland. The Western Australia-based Energy Transition Minerals had been locked in litigation with the Greenlandic government over whether its project could safely extract rare earths such as neodymium, praseodymium, and terbium for magnets and batteries without producing uranium as a byproduct. A previous government in Greenland had banned uranium mining in 2021, effectively halting ETM’s Kvanefjeld project. But the company had told investors in February that it “remains confident in the merits” of its position in negotiations with Greenland and “resolute in our intention to develop Kvanefjeld responsibly and in accordance with international best practice.” Just last week, the company published data showing that it had identified 10 new rare earth deposits “with uranium levels recorded below regulatory thresholds.” If it factored into negotiations at all, it wasn’t enough to change the outcome. Following the rejection on Friday, the company told Reuters: “Greenland has positioned itself as open for business. This decision creates a different impression.” In a sign of how the political winds may be shifting, the headline on Sunday’s front-page story in Sermitsiaq, one of Greenland’s only national newspapers, warned of the “environmental bombs” coming just from future American military bases on the island.
3. Baker Hughes makes a big bet on geothermal
Of all the ways to build up, shore up, and clean up America’s grid, geothermal energy is easily among the most elegant, narratively speaking. We already quietly operate the world’s largest geothermal power plant. The new generation of companies racing to build new power stations require the very same battle-hardened drilling equipment, technologies, and workers that sustained the fracking boom and turned the U.S. into a top global producer of oil and gas. Many of the best-mapped hot rocks are located out west, where the federal government owns vast tracts of land, meaning the strong bipartisan consensus in support of geothermal energy development can, in fact, translate into faster approvals for projects. It’s a bet that one of the nation’s largest oilfield services providers is now making. Last week, Baker Hughes inked a deal with the geothermal developer Mantle Reach Power to support construction of as much as 500 megawatts of new generating capacity. As part of the deal, Baker Hughes will provide its drilling technologies, in a move the company said would “de-risk and deliver” on the promises of geothermal power. “Geothermal is a clean power solution that is proving to be a vital contributor to advancing sustainable energy development, with incredible potential to enhance U.S. energy security, support digital infrastructure, and ensure energy remains accessible and affordable,” Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli said in a statement.
Meanwhile, federal regulators just approved the environmental review of a new conventional geothermal project. Once complete, Ormat Technologies’ Pearl geothermal project in Nevada’s Esmeralda County will generate up to 60 megawatts of power. It’s just the latest approval of what Think Geo Energy called a series of approvals for Ormat’s proposed expansion in Nevada.
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4. China makes a big bet on green hydrogen
Even before the Iran War, momentum was gathering in China for a green hydrogen buildout. The “most important low-carbon policy for 2025,” according to the analyst Jian Wu, was China’s decision to start subsidizing green hydrogen-related applications from central government coffers for the first time as Beijing sought to wean off fossil fuel imports and make use of solar and wind farms that had grown so abundant that the country’s grid operators recently phased out key incentives for renewables. Since the war, Beijing has turned its attention to shoring up its domestic fuel supplies, whether by increasing its domestic drilling, chemically-processing coal, or zapping water with enough renewable electricity to cleanly separate out the hydrogen molecules. Now it’s placing a big bet on the latter. China just put out a new five-year plan for the energy sector with a goal to install more than 2 million metric tons of annual capacity to produce green hydrogen by the end of the decade, Hydrogen Insight reported. That would more than double the existing capacity.
Overall, the document raises the target for China to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by 2030. But its goals for the wind and solar sectors represent a significant slowdown from the recent pace of development, indicating the government’s interest in diversifying its carbon-free electricity sector.
5. Another day, another new nuclear reactor comes online in China
At present, I see three guarantees in my life: Death, taxes, and the likelihood that another Chinese nuclear plant will make significant enough progress to merit telling you about it. Readers hoping to understand the stakes of America’s incipient nuclear renaissance are wise to keep track of how successfully China’s state-owned reactor developers have been building their own domestically-sourced version of the flagship U.S. reactor design. I can’t keep track of how many times we have covered Chinese reactor milestones. But add this to the list: Last week, World Nuclear News reported, the second of six Hualong One reactors at the Taipingling nuclear power plant in Guangdong province started up, sustaining a chain reaction for the first time. The speed with which China General Nuclear completed the domestically-supplied reactor — the design for which is largely cribbed from the Westinghouse AP1000 — highlights the strategy American atomic energy advocates are increasingly promoting. A nonprofit called the Nuclear Scaling Initiative launched in 2024 to propound the idea of focusing on reactors that can be built identically over and over.
THE KICKER
Investors debate the right way to bet on the nuclear revival, and the growing list of startups debuting on the stock market through reverse merger deals that require less scrutiny than traditional initial public offerings provides ample grist for disagreement. But here’s a surefire wrong way: Selling $1.5 million of call option contracts for your employer’s stock on the day of a major announcement that you are playing a pivotal role in overseeing. Yet that’s exactly what the Department of Justice accuses Casey Muggleston, a former engineering manager in charge of relicensing the shuttered Three Mile Island power plant, of doing on the very day his employer, Constellation, announced a landmark deal with Microsoft to reopen the facility to supply its data centers with electricity. If convicted, Muggleston could face a maximum of 25 years in prison, according to ABC27, a TV news station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
I’m partially convinced this is psy op, or at least a figment of how social media organizes attention. I have a hypothesis that various “For You” page algorithms, especially that of the social network X, began to reward content that performed unusually well across national borders a few years ago. Since then, the amount of America vs. Europe content has surged. (Of course, writers have been comparing American and European lifestyles for much longer than that.)
Suffice it to say, though: It’s a fraught topic. I’ve assumed that as extreme heat gets worse as the climate changes, Europeans will simply get on with it and install AC, much as Americans in the Pacific Northwest have done. Yet there are cultural and regulatory obstacles to AC’s growth in Europe.
I’m sure I’ll write about it in the future, but for now I want to get a grip on the facts themselves. And so as a Friday special, I present to you — the facts about European AC, as I understand it:
Only about 19% of European homes have air conditioning. That’s less than the United States, of course. But it’s also less than Canada, which has a more comparable climate. Nearly 70% of Canadian homes have air conditioning or equivalent equipment.
The United States doesn’t have the world’s highest rates of air conditioning penetration, by the way, although 88% of us do have some form of AC. The number one spot is held by Japan, where 91% of homes have cooling.
Only 0.8% of European household energy use goes to space cooling. Again, for comparison, that’s about half the share of energy that goes to space cooling in Canada. (In the U.S., about 6% of household energy use goes to space cooling — and despite our warmer climate, far more energy on average goes to space heating in the winter.)
That said, Europe is catching up fast, particularly in warm countries. Air conditioning penetration has more than doubled in Europe since 1990. More than half of Italian households now have air conditioning. That rate has nearly doubled since 2013, and it has grown much faster in southern Italy than northern Italy.
The further north you go, the more the rates fall. About 28% of French homes and 13% of apartments have some kind of air conditioning. Only about 6% of German homes have AC.
Just over 4% of British homes have air conditioning. What’s most striking to me, though, is that the elderly are most susceptible to heat-related death — and only 3% of households with someone over 75 in the UK have AC.
Scaling the capacity of ports like this to handle ore isn’t the only challenge.Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
