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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.
It happened again. The Trump administration has struck a deal with an offshore wind developer to cancel another round of projects. My colleague Emily Pontecorvo has the full story: The Chicago-based company Invenergy has accepted $765 million to give up four offshore wind leases off the coast of New York, California, and Maine.
These deals might be legally suspect — Democratic state attorneys general sued to block them a few weeks ago — but the administration says more are coming. “The Department of Justice looks forward to continued cooperation from companies that are reevaluating their energy investments,” the official press release about today’s deal intones. I have to applaud the federal lawyer who chose the phrase “continued cooperation” here; it is suitably menacing while implying that developers who give in to the racket are somehow complicit.
If you read Heatmap, you knew a deal like this might be coming. As Emily writes, she predicted that Trump would target Invenergy for a deal back in April. Eyes now turn to the German developer RWE, which is sitting on two more leases and hasn’t yet taken a bargain.
Most observers have seen these deals as a front in the president’s war on wind power. And, of course, they are. But they should also be viewed as part of Trump’s peculiar attack on the economy of coastal states.
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By Heatmap’s tally, the Trump administration has now terminated the leases for more than 14 gigawatts of planned offshore wind capacity, or roughly enough to power at least 6 million to 7 million homes. More than half of those gigawatts were initially planned to go to New York and New Jersey’s strained power markets (and on from there to New England and the Mid-Atlantic).
Another 3.4 gigawatts were planned for Maine’s power grid. Maine already suffers from some of the highest power bills in the country, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub; its rates have risen more than 10% in the past year.
California was slated to get another 4 gigawatts, and the Carolinas were due the last remaining gigawatt.
What’s funny — or perhaps fishy, given the maritime setting — is that administration officials seem to realize that they shouldn’t be taking so much electricity generation off the map. Today’s Invenergy deal includes a new quasi-quid pro quo arrangement: In exchange for giving up its offshore wind leases, Invenergy agreed to develop natural gas or geothermal power plants in Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. (Previous deals countenanced only fossil fuel development, so I suppose this counts as a “win.”)
But of course, as Hilary Bright, who leads the pro-wind group Turn Forward, argued this afternoon, that doesn’t work. “These buyouts are not one-for-one ‘swaps’ for another kind of energy,” she said in a statement. These wind farms were meant to bring new generation capacity online in some of the country’s most stressed power markets. It doesn’t work to cancel them, then build new power plants in the middle of the country. New York is particularly power-constrained at the moment and faces a risk of summertime blackouts as soon as the end of this decade. Invenergy’s wind leases in the tristate area — or, as FIFA would call it, New York/New Jersey — were closer to operation than any of its other projects.
If and when blackouts arrive in Gotham, will New Yorkers look back and remember this moment? Or — somewhat more importantly to Trump — will voters in Maine and North Carolina, both of which have elections this November that will help determine the balance of the Senate. Whatever happens, we’ll be watching it here at Heatmap.
In the third deal of its kind, Trump’s Interior Department has agreed to pay the energy developer Invenergy $765 million to cancel its four offshore wind leases, an amount equal to what Invenergy originally paid the federal government for them.
Like the preceding deals, the administration structured the refund as a legal settlement with Invenergy. That means the government will pay the company out of the Judgment Fund, a reserve of taxpayer dollars overseen by the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department that’s set aside to settle litigation that’s either ongoing or imminent.
The Invenergy agreement follows a similar $928 million arrangement with TotalEnergies announced in March, and an $885 million agreement with several joint ventures in April. That brings the total amount the Trump administration has agreed to pay to cancel offshore wind leases to more than $2.5 billion to date. The agency has not yet posted the settlement publicly, but the previous agreements were predicated on hypothetical lawsuits that the offshore wind developers would have filed if the Trump administration had paused activity on their leases, which it threatened to do based on national security concerns.
The key difference in the Invenergy agreement is in the quid pro quo. The other settlements specified that the companies would only be eligible for payment after investing an equal amount into U.S. oil and gas projects. In exchange for walking away from its offshore wind leases, Invenergy promised not only to develop natural gas-fired power plants, but also geothermal power generation projects — which are emissions-free.
Invenergy is a diversified power developer that builds solar, storage, wind, and natural gas generation. The company currently has more than 30 gigawatts of solar in its development pipeline and 10 gigawatts of natural gas. It has not yet built a geothermal power plant, but it has leased 139,000 acres of federal land to explore geothermal development. It’s also a member of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium, a group of states, investors, and companies working together to scale the technology.
Invenergy holds one offshore wind lease off the coast of New York and New Jersey that it purchased in 2022 for $645 million, where it was developing its Leading Light project before work stalled last November. It also has a lease off the coast of California that it acquired for $112 million, also in 2022, and two in the Gulf of Maine, for which it paid about $9 million in 2024.
In a blog post published Wednesday, Invenergy said the deal with the Trump administration would “bring more megawatts to the grid and advance projects that can move forward today,” implying that the projects the company will build instead of offshore wind will come online faster.
The problem with Trump’s quid pro quos across all of these deals is that there’s no guarantee the companies wouldn’t have invested the same amount of money into the same projects regardless of whether they were reimbursed for their offshore wind leases. In the case of Total, the settlement is explicit that projects the company had already committed to invest in prior to the deal qualify.
After the administration announced the second round of offshore wind lease buyouts in April, making it clear the strategy was not a one-off settlement with Total but a new strategy to squash the industry, I named Invenergy as one of two developers that could be next. The other one that seems positioned to reach a similar deal is RWE, a German energy company with plans to develop 15 natural gas plants in the U.S. RWE paid $1.1 billion in 2022 to purchase a lease off the coast of New York and New Jersey for a project called Community Offshore — the most any company has paid to date for U.S. offshore wind development rights. It also bought a lease in the Pacific for $121 million, and another in the Gulf of Mexico for about $4 million.
In a press release, the Interior Department signaled its intention to broker more such agreements. “The Department of Justice looks forward to continued cooperation from companies that are reevaluating their energy investments,” it said.
Legal experts I’ve spoken with are skeptical that any of these settlement agreements comply with federal law. The government’s leasing statutes generally do not allow companies to walk away from their agreement and receive a refund.
Earlier this month, a group of seven attorneys general from Northeast states challenged Trump’s deal with TotalEnergies in court. They alleged that there was no actual disagreement between the parties that would legitimize use of the Judgement Fund. They also argued that under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the statute governing offshore wind, the Interior Department was required to hold a hearing to investigate whether continued activity on the lease would cause serious harm to the environment or national security before cancelling it.
The Trump administration has lost every lawsuit thrown its way so far challenging its actions on offshore wind. Last week, it quietly gave up its own appeal of a federal court’s December decision vacating Trump’s Day One Executive Order to halt wind energy approvals. The Invenergy deal suggests that this was less a sign of surrender in Trump’s wind war than part of a pivot to other strategies.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the press release from the Department of the Interior.
To the extent that any $965 billion artificial intelligence company built on pirated model training material can be “good-coded,” Anthropic has somehow managed to earn that reputation, at least relative to its peers. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that the company has been silent on climate change.
Until today. Sort of.
Frontier Climate, a corporate initiative to drive advances in carbon removal, announced a $915 million advance market commitment growth fund on Wednesday, naming Anthropic as one of the participating buyers.
Frontier supports projects that are capable of sucking large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere, a solution scientists say is a critical supplement to reducing emissions in order to curb climate change. With the new fund, Frontier is shifting its focus from supporting early innovation to taking bigger swings on fewer, larger projects. Anthropic, alongside Google, Stripe, Shopify, and others, has committed to co-sign offtake agreements to buy the resulting carbon removal.
The news throws into relief Anthropic’s nearly complete absence from the clean energy development picture. The company’s primary contribution to climate change is its energy consumption, which is driving up coal and natural gas-fired power generation. According to data shared with Heatmap by the market intelligence company Cleanview, the average carbon intensity of Anthropic’s data centers is among the highest of its competitors, second only to xAI. Yet unlike many of peers, the company has not announced a single clean power purchase agreement to date.
Anthropic’s reputation as the ethical AI company traces back to its origin story, which begins with a guy leaving OpenAI to build a company more committed to AI safety. That guy, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, speaks and writes openly about the risks to humanity posed by powerful AI. Anthropic has also donated millions to support the development of AI regulations and prohibited the use of its models for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, putting it at odds with the Trump administration. The company has focused on text-based products, in part to avoid the risk of users creating child sexual abuse material.
To date, however, the company has not publicized any sustainability strategy, nor has it published an annual sustainability report. It has not made any public commitments to use clean energy or reduce emissions. It is not a member of the Corporate Energy Buyers Association, a trade group representing companies that buy emissions-free energy. The only mention of any of the above themes in the company’s “Transparency Hub” is a note that many of its customers use Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to “increase public health, education, environmental sustainability, and societal benefits.”
To be fair, it’s not that Anthropic has never discussed clean power. In a July 2025 report titled “Building AI in America,” the company made recommendations for ensuring the U.S. can support a competitive AI industry. It advocated for an “all of the above” approach to power generation to meet AI demand in the near term, which would “maximize opportunities for AI to catalyze emerging energy technologies, such as next-generation geothermal and advanced nuclear” down the line. It endorsed permitting reform to speed up transmission development and called for increased domestic production of electrical grid equipment.
In a section on the use of federal lands, the report also made a subtle dig at the Trump administration’s discriminatory policies against wind and solar. It noted that “solar, batteries, and geothermal may prove the most economically efficient choices before advanced nuclear power comes online,” and that “limiting developers’ opportunities to procure some power sources but not others” could make American AI “less competitive in a period of global competition.”
From one perspective, it makes sense that Anthropic hasn’t gone out of its way to procure clean power. To date, the company has mostly leased data center capacity from other providers that do have clean power commitments, including Amazon and Google. That will soon be the case no longer, however, as it is planning to both build its own data centers and rent capacity from xAI’s Colossus data centers, which rely heavily on power from on-site natural gas turbines. Colossus is currently the subject of a lawsuit filed by the NAACP over its air pollution.
Anthropic also doesn’t need to own and operate its own data centers to assume responsibility on climate change. Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the think tank the Searchlight Institute, argued in a recent paper that companies should forget trying to minimize their individual carbon footprints and just make the most high-leverage investments they can, whether that’s helping to finance a geothermal power plant or a transmission line or a new transformer for the grid.
Anthropic did not respond to my inquiry for this story, but there’s some evidence to suggest that the company may be starting to take on climate and clean energy beyond the Frontier deal.
In March and April, Anthropic made three new hires to lead its energy strategy who all have a background in clean power. Ariel Horowitz is the company’s new data center energy lead. She previously spent five years at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center before becoming the deputy director of grid modernization at the federal Department of Energy during the Biden administration. Sana Ouiji, who spent six years at Google working on data center clean energy strategy, is one of Anthropic’s new energy leads. Another new energy lead, Andrew Rudersdorf, came from roles sourcing energy for Meta’s data centers, including renewables.
The company is also currently hiring for a director of infrastructure and energy accounting, and looking for someone with “experience accounting for energy contracts — Power Purchase Agreements, Virtual PPAs, Renewable Energy Credits, or similar commodity arrangements,” according to the job listing.
Anthropic also appears to be preparing for mandatory emissions reporting rules that large companies will soon be subject to in California and the European Union. In April, the company hired Chris Power, who previously worked in sustainability reporting for Amazon and Salesforce, as its new head of non-financial reporting and strategy, according to LinkedIn. In a post announcing his new job, Power said part of his role would be building out the company’s sustainability reporting capabilities.
While funding carbon removal through Frontier is a major step forward for Anthropic on climate, the company is sure to face criticism over its order of operations. Scientists largely agree that carbon removal is an important solution for down the line, but only if the world also dramatically reduces the amount of carbon it emits in the first place — not least because doing so is less expensive and less resource-intensive than removing emissions in the future.
My colleague Robinson Meyer had Hannah Bebbington Valori, the head of Frontier, on his podcast Shift Key this morning, and asked her whether Anthropic is an example of the common concern that the potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere in the future could be used to delay cutting emissions today.
Bebbington Valori didn’t comment on Anthropic specifically. But she did say that most of the companies buying carbon removal with Frontier and otherwise do have broader climate programs. She also noted that buying carbon removal from Frontier is not a “get out jail free card,” since it costs hundreds of dollars per carbon credit, and that in general the world is spending a lot more money on decarbonization than carbon removal.
“And then, you know, the other way to answer this question,” she added, “is we should hold folks’ feet to the fire on this. People who buy carbon removal, people who don’t buy carbon removal, should be thinking about decarbonizing their emissions.”
