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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.
This is Heatmap Daily, an evening news digest written by our executive editor. Subscribe here.
Updated, 11:05 p.m. ET
At the end of the day, the biggest threat to the bipartisan permitting deal probably isn’t green groups, the fossil fuel industry, or monopoly utilities. It’s President Trump himself.
The legislative proposal is meant to constrain the president from tampering with clean energy projects — and if it passes, then some of its provisions seem like they could do so. But in order for it to pass, Trump must adhere to the deal that he brokered with the bill’s Senate Democratic negotiators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.
Under that deal, the Trump administration must allow the 30 wind farms held up by what is normally a Department of Defense box-checking exercise to proceed. (Trump himself agreed to allow these projects to move forward, according to Politico reporting from last month.) More broadly, the administration has to make a show of good faith that it will return to what Whitehouse has called “regular order” on wind and solar permits. That could include approving a longer list of more than 200 onshore wind projects held up in the queue.
That somewhat informal deal is now facing its biggest test yet. On Friday, the Department of Justice filed a motion in court to re-examine a key permit granted to Revolution Wind, a nearly complete offshore wind farm being built off the coast of Rhode Island. The filing was first reported by Bloomberg.
Revolution Wind is one of six Biden-era offshore projects that is now operating or at least still moving forward. It could eventually produce as much as 700 megawatts of electricity. (Other offshore wind projects have accepted Trump’s $4 billion payouts.)
This isn’t the first time that the Trump administration has gone after this particular offshore project: The White House fought, and then resoundingly lost, an effort to stop work on Revolution Wind last year. But the timing of the filing — and the fact that it’s happening in Senator Whitehouse’s backyard — could make this filing far more significant.
In a post on X, the White House energy official Jarrod Agen seemed to play down the legal move without fully disowning it.
“This is an old lawsuit brought by the local community—who had serious concerns about this project—against the Biden Administration!,” he wrote. (The lawsuit in question was filed by Green Oceans, an anti-wind-energy group. Its law firm has what The New York Times described as “close ties” to the conservative legal movement.)
The White House still supports permitting reform, Agen added, adding that “the media should stop their attempts to blow up a GREAT deal for the American people!”
Sorry, Jarrod — we’re just doing our job. After we initially published this story, Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich sent a joint statement: “Frankly, we need to get permitting certainty in law, and this proves it,” they said. “In the meantime, the administration needs to start showing good faith progress on wind permits.”
A bipartisan group of senators proposed major reforms to the country’s environmental laws last month in an effort to speed up the federal approval process for energy projects of all kinds. If it passes, one of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act’s biggest changes would be transforming the U.S. court system’s role in federal environmental reviews.
The bill would constrain who can challenge federal environmental decisions in court, which courts can hear those challenges, what plaintiffs can argue in those cases, and what remedies are available when the plaintiffs win. In particular, it would become a lot more difficult — though not impossible — for outside groups to stop construction on a project or vacate a permit if they deemed it to be environmentally risky.
Part of the motivation for the bill, at least among Democrats, is the idea that the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, has become a significant obstacle to building clean energy projects and the infrastructure required to connect them to the grid. The bill includes a number of changes to NEPA that would expedite environmental reviews and prevent legal challenges under NEPA from dragging out project timelines.
But the bill’s restrictions on judicial remedies may be the most significant change, several legal experts told me. “My perhaps overly simplistic view, perhaps a really cynical view, is that the remaining 100 pages of the bill devoted to NEPA are all going to be irrelevant in light of that remedy provision,” said Matthew Littleton, a lawyer who previously served as deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division under the Biden administration.
NEPA is an information-gathering statute. It says that when the federal government makes certain decisions, such as issuing permits or regulatory rules, it must consult with all of the agencies with relevant expertise, invite public comment, and, if the decision could have significant effects on the environment, conduct a wide-ranging assessment of those effects that includes comparisons to alternative actions.
Depending on the decision at hand, the government may have to do some of this analysis under other environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, but those requirements are narrower. NEPA fills in the gaps. While a Clean Air Act analysis may look at whether a project complies with federal pollution limits, a NEPA analysis would assess the broader effects of the pollution on local communities and surrounding wildlife, and consider whether locating the project elsewhere could accomplish the same goals with reduced risk.
While NEPA can inform an agency’s decision, the law does not require the agency to act on that information. If a NEPA review of an oil leasing program turns up substantial risks, for example, the government can still move forward with it unchanged. If an environmental group sues the government for not considering all of the relevant impacts, or studying enough alternatives, or getting some aspect of the analysis wrong, however, the court can vacate the agency’s decision, or at least issue an injunction on the lease sale while the agency addresses the issue.
A Supreme Court decision last year already significantly narrowed NEPA, giving agencies more discretion to decide how much environmental analysis they need to do on a project’s upstream and downstream effects. Experts expected the ruling to make it much harder for outside groups to win an injunction on a project or vacate a permit.
The new bill would go much farther. If communities or other stakeholders sue the government for violating NEPA and win, the courts could no longer issue an injunction or vacate the government’s decision. The bill would leave the courts with a single remedy: forcing the agency to address whatever gap in its analysis the lawsuit revealed.
To Littleton, this change would make NEPA more or less irrelevant. Today, he explained, agencies and developers face the risk that if they do not do a thorough job complying with NEPA, the courts could suspend their decisions, vacate their permits, or pause construction on their projects. It’s hard to know how big of a role that risk plays in agency decision-making, but if it disappears, so too does the incentive for anyone to spend time on a NEPA analysis.
Agencies are under-resourced and have a lot on their plates, Littleton said. “If at the end of the day you know a court is not going to stop you, even if you completely ignore the statute, you’re going to take the action as quickly as you can, consistent with your other obligations.” In other words, the worst that could happen is that a federal court tells the relevant agency to go back and do some more paperwork while construction continues.
The bill would make the same changes to the National Historic Preservation Act, a similar procedural law that requires agencies to study a decision’s effects on properties of cultural or historic significance. “If Congress has decided that NEPA and the NHPA have outlived their usefulness or do more harm than good, people should be willing to own that and say it and explain why that’s so,” Littleton said. “And if it’s not so, then maybe they need to figure out how to have a far narrower NEPA or NHPA review, but something where it actually matters if you don't do it.”
To be clear, none of this means there will be no way to stop a project from being built or to vacate its permits. Outside groups can still challenge agency actions under the Administrative Procedure Act, Alex Mechanick, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins and a former senior counselor in the Office of Management and Budget under the Biden administration, told me. The APA is a larger umbrella law that says agencies cannot violate the Constitution or federal regulations or act arbitrarily or capriciously.
“Arbitrary and capricious action is already unlawful under the APA and could lead to agency action being vacated or enjoined regardless of BAAJA,” Mechanick said. A court might find that an agency violated the APA if a decision had undeniably worse environmental costs than benefits, if a less damaging option offered the same benefits, or if the agency simply chose not to analyze a relevant aspect of the decision. If the Interior Department was considering a new oil and gas leasing plan and didn’t consider effects on local wildlife, a court might deem that arbitrary and capricious. If the agency studied those effects, found significant risks, and then ignored them entirely with no explanation, that could also constitute a violation of the APA.
Littleton didn’t disagree with Mechanick’s assessment. If the bill passes, he said, the NEPA process may become the mechanism agencies use to comply with the APA rather than an end in itself.
The bill makes a more far-reaching change to legal challenges under the Clean Water Act. That law requires developers to secure a Section 404 permit when their project involves placing dredged materials into a body of water or wetland. It asks the Army Corps of Engineers to collect public comments, analyze the environmental impacts, and evaluate alternatives — much like NEPA. In this case, however, the analysis is not just procedural. Depending on what it reveals, the Corps may be legally required to deny the permit.
As with NEPA and the NHPA, the Senate bill would remove a federal court’s ability to vacate a Section 404 permit if it finds a deficiency in the Army Corps’ analysis. But the bill also specifically prevents vacatur for challenges under the APA. In either case, there is an exception for if the court finds that the “activities authorized under the permit would present an imminent and substantial danger to human health or the environment.”
Mechanick called this a “timing rule,” since the court’s options will depend on how far along the project is. The agency either has enough time to act before harm is imminent, or it doesn’t. “I don’t understand why you should have to wait until the harm is imminent to enjoin the agency,” he said, “but I suppose the idea is that this is a lighter touch remedy until it’s really a do-or-die moment.”
Current conditions: New York City’s temperature is set to rise as high as 80 degrees Fahrenheit this week before plunging as the coldest weather so far this season blows into the Northeast • Temperatures in Denver have been above 80 degrees for the past 11 days straight • Nearly 200,000 households, mostly in Florida, are still without electricity after Hurricane Isaias.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Oil prices spike as attacks on Saudi Arabia overshadow Russian diesel deal
In theory, news of President Donald Trump’s deal with Russia to pump millions of tons of diesel into the global market should have eased oil prices. Instead, all three major crude benchmarks spiked Monday by nearly 1.5%. Only West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. metric that has largely evaded the worst knock-on effects of conflict in the Middle East, remained below $100 per barrel. The hike came as the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia over the weekend weighed heavily on investors’ minds, eclipsing whatever impact the diesel deal could have had.
Speaking at an industry summit in Riyadh, from which executives from Western oil majors bowed out at the last minute following missile strikes on the airport in the Saudi capital, the head of the country’s state oil company warned that not even Saudi Arabia had the capacity to protect all the supply routes off its coasts for getting hydrocarbons from the region to the world. “No nation, even one as capable and confident as ours, can safeguard them alone,” Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said, according to Arab News.
2. TotalEnergies buys a bunch of U.S. solar after quitting offshore wind
TotalEnergies took more than $1 billion from the Trump administration to kill off its offshore wind projects. But don’t take that as a sign the French energy behemoth is abandoning American renewables. The company’s joint venture with private equity giant KKR announced a deal to add 700 megawatts of solar to its portfolio of 1.4 gigawatts. The $1.2 billion acquisition includes three utility-scale solar farms in Texas and Ohio that are expected to reach commercial operation in the first quarter of next year.
3. South Korea is angling for up to 10% of Westinghouse
A South Korean nuclear plant in Busan. Seung-il Ryu/NurPhoto via Getty Images
South Korea is in a bind. The Korea Electric Power Corporation, through its subsidiary Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, represents the most competent financier and builder of nuclear reactors anywhere in the democratic world, having constructed the United Arab Emirates’ debut atomic power stations relatively on time and on budget compared to U.S., French, and British projects. But the leading Korean reactor, the APR1400, allegedly borrowed from the American nuclear champion Westinghouse’s pressurized water reactor design. A yearslong legal feud ended last year with a settlement that bars the Koreans from bidding on projects in Europe or North America. In a deal this month with the Trump administration to stave off tariffs, Seoul has agreed to help finance and construct six Westinghouse AP1000s and two of its own APR1400s in the U.S., giving the Americans a leg up on nuclear construction and the Koreans a foothold in North America.
In South Korea, where the Westinghouse settlement has widely been considered unfair, the government is signaling other plans to gain more leverage. For starters, KEPCO’s chief executive Kim Dong-cheol said the claim that the settlement requires the company to pay Westinghouse $2 billion per nuclear plant to use its technology was misunderstood. “It is true that $2 billion is the ceiling, but it does not mean we will pay all of it,” he said. But the more eyebrow-raising detail in his interview with the financial newspaper Business Korea is that KEPCO is considering a plan to acquire an equity stake of between 5% and 10% in Westinghouse. Rumors of a potential deal to buy part of Westinghouse have been circulating in the Korean press for weeks now. Anything seems to be on the table these days, but when I have asked multiple sources on the U.S. side about it, all of them shrugged off the possibility to me.
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When The New York Times ran a glowing profile of the lithium startup EnergyX back in 2021, industry sources at the time mocked the coverage to me as too credulous — a sign of how unsophisticated the popular American press was at writing about critical minerals at the time. The Wall Street Journal glazed the firm’s chief executive, Teague Egan, in its own profile three years later. So it was with light surprise and amusement that I read Reuters reporter Ernest Scheyder’s latest story about the company: EnergyX just signed a $2 billion binding offtake to supply the commodities giant Trafigura with the battery metal from Chile and the U.S. It’s one of the largest deals ever tied to direct lithium extraction, the technology EnergyX is trying to commercialize, which uses less water than standard methods of mining the metal. The 10-year contract comes amid growing demand from the stationary battery storage market as the grid and data centers eat what unsteady sales of electric vehicles has left on the plate.
5. Britain is cutting funding for heat pumps
The British government plans to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the national program to upgrade boilers in England and Wales, providing £9,000, or nearly $12,000, to finance the switch to heat pumps. The cuts, which the Financial Times reported Monday had drawn a backlash against the ruling Labour Party, are part of a broader bid by Prime Minister Andy Burnham to slash £2 billion in the budget to make way for more military spending. The reductions began in June under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer with a study to identify potential cuts. Starmer singled out the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, particularly after the agency received a 16% annual increase to fund projects such as the nuclear buildout at Sizewell C, carbon capture infrastructure, and insulation to make homes more energy efficient.
The move is sure to ripple across the climate policy world. Roughly a week ago, Daniel Aldana Cohen, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was extolling the benefits of ramping up U.S. production of heat pumps in response to soaring heating prices this winter due to the fossil fuel supply crunch. “Every year that we don’t do a wartime mobilization on heat pumps, we’re ruining people’s lives,” the early advocate of a Green New Deal wrote in a post on X. “Heat pumps will always outperform heating oil, cut costs, add summer AC. And would be fantastic for labor, small businesses, worker co-ops.”
THE KICKER
As quickly as a spark of atmospheric electricity strikes, the Ford F-150 Lightning disappeared, with the final model of the all-electric pickup truck rolling off the assembly line last year. Now, Bloomberg reports, “it has become one of the most coveted cars in America and a glowing ember in the red-hot market for used electric vehicles.” The price of a used Lightning is 50% to 60% of the sticker price, which one expert told the newswire “is really a sweet spot.”
A South Korean nuclear plant in Busan. Seung-il Ryu/NurPhoto via Getty Images