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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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I’ve got an update for you on the data center backlash — and what it could mean for the governor’s race in Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important state-level battles in the upcoming midterms.
Last week, I wrote about how the Republican congressman and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany was trying to turn the data center issue into a kind of trojan horse for slowing down renewables. Tiffany claimed to be anti-data-center, but he was really looking to apply new and stricter rules to clean energy development, as well.
Over the weekend, Tiffany said the quiet part loud. “David Crowley wants to cover our farmland with industrial-scale wind, solar, and data centers,” he posted on X. (He also started calling his opponent “Data Center David Crowley.”) Tiffany vowed to “protect Wisconsin farmland,” picking up on the idea — already used by the Trump administration to stymie solar development — that renewables threaten the integrity of agricultural land.
Now Crowley isn’t nearly as pro-data-center as Tiffany claims, although he has said the computing facilities should run on 100% clean energy. Yet Tiffany's accusation made me curious: How many local governments now see data centers and renewables as a package deal — and a farmland-threatening incursion that should be blocked? Back in March, my colleague Jael Holzman has covered how data centers are turning Americans against renewables. Are we seeing that on the ground?
Our market intelligence service Heatmap Pro tracks local laws affecting clean energy, batteries, and data centers. I asked the Pro team to look at how many local governments have now banned all three types of infrastructure — communities with what you might call a “none of the above” policy.
There’s mostly good news in the results for renewables advocates. The number of towns and counties that have blocked data centers, solar, and batteries remains small. As of late last week, 21 counties across the country have an active restriction or moratorium on solar, batteries, and data centers combined.
Another 10 counties have banned either data centers and solar, or data centers and batteries, but not all three. Six cities or municipalities have placed combined restrictions on the technologies nationwide.
The bad news: The number is growing fast. Most of these “none-of-the-above” restrictions were passed in 2026, and the overwhelming majority are in the rural Midwest and Great Plains. Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana account for most of the moratoriums or restrictive laws.
Not all of the restrictions are new. Although most of these multi-technology restrictions get passed at the same time, a handful of counties blocked solar and batteries first, then tacked on data centers later. Dickinson County, Kansas, for instance, has long blocked solar and batteries. But this spring, as the data center boom came along, the county’s leaders extended that moratorium to apply to data centers and all forms of energy development — including natural gas.
Overall, the scale of the trend remains small. Less than 10% of data center restrictions nationwide also target clean energy. That’s good news for renewable developers because the number of data center ordinances is surging. More than 530 data center restrictions are now on the books nationwide, and most restrictions have come in the past 12 months.
And what about the Wisconsin election? As of right now, only one county in America’s Dairyland has restricted data centers and batteries together. None have restricted solar, wind, and batteries. But Tiffany does seem to be tapping into a much larger zeitgeist. When you look at the stated reasons why communities nationwide are adopting these policies, farmland protection ranks high on the list. When it comes to permitting politics, in other words, farmland looks like the next frontier.
All I wanted was to drive an electric car to the solar eclipse. But after the third consecutive charging port RFID reader wouldn’t accept my credit card and finding that the employees inside the attached Spanish hotel restaurant mostly didn’t speak English, I began to feel as though, just maybe, this hadn’t been my best idea.
Opting for an EV as a rental car can be an attractive proposition. For a longtime electric driver like me, it’s the opportunity to avoid car emissions even when on holiday, and to try out the experience in another country. For others, it could be a way to save money while on vacation in countries with even more expensive gasoline than America’s, or perhaps to try out electric driving before taking the plunge on buying an EV back home.
My advice, though? Don’t — at least not yet. The reason is that road-tripping on vacation is not only different from the driving you do back home, it’s also the worst kind for using an EV, especially for a newbie. The experience might lead you to believe, incorrectly, that the EV experience is just like this.
I admit, I had high hopes. Europe as a whole is far ahead of the United States in EV adoption, and its denser built environment means fewer long, open expanses between the kinds of cities that would have charging stations. Spain isn’t nearly as far along with EVs as the Scandinavian or the low countries, where electric cars are already a majority of cars on the road, or nearly there. But it is ahead of the U.S. So I figured driving around the country to see the total solar eclipse in a Peugeot E-5008 electric SUV would be a manageable task.
The first problem is time. Here in California, I’ve come to terms with the fact that driving long distances in an EV adds minutes. There’s simply no way to replicate the five-minute pump-and-go gas station stop, but when it comes to dealing with the slog of freeway travel from L.A. to the Bay Area, for example, I’ve come to enjoy taking a longer charging stop to breathe as opposed to making the best possible time on a car trip. On vacation, though, there’s no time to lose.
And it’s not just charging itself that takes time. Unless you rent a Tesla and enjoy the seamless experience of its Superchargers, you’re stuck with the same annoyances that have vexed so many EV early adopters in the U.S.: busted chargers, hit-or-miss credit card readers, and juggling a variety of phone apps to interact with all the various brands of charging stations one might encounter. It’s also, frankly, just mentally taxing to think about all this in a new country and a new car, the very opposite of what most people seek on holiday.
Driving abroad intensifies these grievances. In just five days of driving around Spain, I racked up five new phone apps dedicated to charging the car on different networks. (Electromaps! Movilidad! PowerGo! EnelEnergy! Zunder!). Sometimes this was out of desperation: I parked, plugged, and scanned multiple credit cards that the machine would not accept, finding pay-by-phone to be the only way to activate the machine. Of course, signing up for a new app is a 10-minute process that involves typing in endless fields of personal information just to add a few kilowatt-hours to one’s car battery. Not great when you’re already running behind, and doubly problematic if you had no or little cell service abroad and couldn’t download the necessary app at that moment. (Death to walled-off apps.)
Those chargers that did work typically ran far below their stated capacity, in the range of 70 kilowatts to 90 kilowatts of charging speed as opposed to the 180 kilowatts or 350 kilowatts they were rated to deliver. And when plugs are scarce, you have to take what you can get in terms of speed and amenities. I was overjoyed to find one that worked without much hassle in Basque Country — even though I had to ask one of the gas station employees to move her Volkswagen Passat that was ICEing a charger, and encountered an industrial stench from nearby petroleum production so strong I nearly vomited when I got out of the car.
The EV culture can be different, too. I’d hoped to charge at the plugs located in the parking garage of my hotel in Bilbao, Spain, but arrived home too late after eclipse traveling and found the lot full and locked. The nearby underground structure had plenty of charging spaces, but those were bring-your-own-cable chargers — something common in Europe that’s only now coming to the United States.
Despite the difficulties, the trip went off. We saw the spiritual experience of the eclipse through the cloudless skies of Burgos; we traveled around northern Spain without once having to buy gasoline at European prices. And while an inconvenient experience like this might be enough to dissuade someone from ever taking a chance on EVs again, it shouldn’t.
There’s a dichotomy in the electric car experience I’ve talked about ad nauseum. As detractors say, taking long road trips can be kind of annoying, and those annoyances run deeper in unfamiliar territory. But most of us don’t drive like we’re on vacation most of the time. We do our driving close to home, where electric cars are a better and more convenient experience if you can do much of your charging at home or work. Public charging still takes time. But in your own city and state, you already know the nearby ones you like and have all the necessary apps downloaded and filled out.
A more seamless time is coming, when charging stations are abundant everywhere and a simple, idiot-proof interface for plugging in is the standard. Until then, you’ll probably have a more relaxing vacation burning fossil fuels. Just don’t let that stop you from buying an EV.
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Moke sideswiped Hawaii yesterday just weeks after a weakened Hurricane Lala became the first major storm to hit the Big Island in decades • On the western fringe of the United States’ Pacific borders, Typhoon Saudel struck Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands over the weekend, bringing heavy rain and flooding • Temperatures in Khorramshahr, on Iran’s border with Iraq, are topping 118 degrees Fahrenheit, rendering the southwestern port city the hottest place on Earth.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump administration orders Arizona, California, and Nevada to cut water use
With water levels in reservoirs across the American West at record lows, the Trump administration has directed Arizona, California, and Nevada to cut back on how much water they use from the Colorado River over the next two years. On Friday, the Department of the Interior imposed the reductions via a series of documents detailing a two-year and a 10-year plan to salvage the supplies from the drought-stricken river fed by snowmelt from Colorado’s stretch of the Rocky Mountains. As climate change has shifted snow patterns, levels on the river have dropped. Yet the seven states that depend on the water — the aforementioned three in the Lower Basin, and Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Upper Basin — could not come to agreement among themselves on how to divvy up the dwindling supply. Instead, the Interior Department came up with a proposal that forced the Lower Basin states to pare back first. As you may recall, Arizona’s Democratic governor called the cuts “draconian” when the administration released its proposal in early August. The plan, which imposes short-term cuts while leaving a larger split for later, sets the stage for what E&E News predicted would be “a behemoth legal fight.”
2. Energy Department redirects $500 million for green steel to upgrading a coal-fired blast furnace
When the Department of Energy announced a review last year of droves of grants the Biden administration had given for clean industrial projects, the nation’s leading green steel project appeared on the chopping block. Cleveland-Cliffs, the steel giant based in Vice President JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio, said it was renegotiating the $500 million grant that was supposed to fund construction of a modern, integrated mill that could increase U.S. steel production and allow the country to compete with China in selling lower-carbon material to Europe. More than a year later, the deal has finally been renegotiated. As expected, the money will now go instead toward upgrading a coal-fired blast furnace at the Middletown Works plant, Canary Media reported on Friday. Never mind the fact that Congress promulgated the money specifically for lower-carbon steel, making the shift “possibly illegal,” as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported last year.
3. Congestion costs on largest U.S. grid spike by nearly half
Congestion costs on PJM Interconnection skyrocketed 43% to $6 billion during the first half of this year, up from $2.1 billion during the same period of 2025. That’s according to the grid’s independent watchdog, which last week warned that bottlenecks on high-voltage transmission lines during high-stress events such as storms or heat waves were now what Reuters put bluntly as “the single biggest driver of the increase in soaring wholesale electricity costs.” Across the U.S., July’s electricity bills were, in the frank words of Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin, “higher than ever.”
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4. America’s nuclear fuel supply chain is forming anew
Last week, the uranium miner Ur-Energy sent the first shipment from its mine in Wyoming, World Nuclear News reported Friday. That same day, the American subsidiary of the European uranium giant Urenco broke ground on its latest facility in the U.S., NucNet reported. Downstream, meanwhile, Standard Nuclear — a fuel manufacturer specializing in extra-expensive but extra-safe ceramic-coated fuel pellets called TRISO, which I have written about previously— just cut another deal with a major vendor.
5. Tesla abandons solar roof tiles
I have a confession. Nearly a decade ago, I sat at my sister’s kitchen counter in Massachusetts after she gave birth to my niece, trying to write about the latest technology to come out from Tesla. Not yet burdened by its billionaire chief executive’s political baggage, the company was largely seen at the time as subverting preconceptions about the popularity of electric vehicles. Tesla’s erstwhile absorption of Musk’s former solar manufacturer, Solar City, only cemented the company’s status as an industry leader in producing and deploying panels domestically. The conventional wisdom, at least among some industry analysts at the time, was that any bet against Tesla was an ill-advised gamble against the lucky Mr. Musk. So, I wrote about it as a breakthrough. But the solar-generating roof tiles the company unveiled that fall when I was in New England turned out to be little more than a passing fantasy. Now Electrek has reported that the company plans to discontinue the product.
THE KICKER
And I said, dam. Egyptian Cabinet/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Say what you will about Spain’s solar records or America’s gas surge, nothing quite matches the enormous surge of power that is a new hydroelectric station. This week, Tanzania christened its largest-ever hydroelectric station, the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Dam, named for the country’s revolutionary first prime minister after independence. Mwananchi, the country’s largest newspaper, said the plant’s launch “opened a new chapter in Tanzania’s energy sector.”
And I said, dam. Egyptian Cabinet/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images