Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force
reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to
that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile
here
.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey,
you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and
take advantage of our introductory offer.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
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.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the first draft of its portion of Trump’s big budget bill on Tuesday, and it includes the first official swipe at the Inflation Reduction Act of the months-long process ahead.
Remember, the name of the game for Republicans is to find ways to pay for Trump’s long list of tax cuts. The budget framework Congress passed two weeks ago assigned eleven House committees to craft proposals that would each raise or reduce revenue by a specific amount to accomplish Trump’s agenda.
The Transportation Committee proposal contains one new revenue-generating program, placing a $200 annual fee on electric vehicles and $100 fee on hybrid vehicles, alongside a $20 fee on conventional cars. The money would go into the Highway Trust Fund, which is currently financed mostly by the gas tax — and which, of course, EV owners don’t pay.
But the draft also includes a list of “rescissions” of unobligated funds from seven IRA grant programs. While the Biden administration awarded the vast majority of the money allocated to the programs listed, in many cases the recipients never reached a final project agreement with the government. That means a lot of the funding can, in fact, be clawed back.
Take the first item on the list, the Alternative Fuel and Low Emissions Aviation Technology Program. The IRA allocated $291 million for grants to support producing sustainable aviation fuel and developing low-emission aviation technologies, and the Biden administration awarded the full amount to 36 recipients in August of last year. It’s not clear how many reached final project agreements with the Federal Aviation Administration, however. A quick scan of the government’s database of awards is missing a $25.7 million grant to oil giant BP to produce sustainable aviation fuel at its refinery in Washington State, but it does include the full obligation of $240,000 to the City of Atlanta to conduct a study on deploying SAF at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
Grants aren’t always logged in USASpending.gov in a timely manner, so it’s possible BP does have an agreement in place. Among the other awardees that I could not find listed in the database were World Energy, which was awarded nearly $22 million to install infrastructure enabling Los Angeles International Airport to get deliveries of SAF, and Buckeye Terminals, which got $24 million to upgrade four SAF storage facilities in the midwest. Republicans tend to support biofuels, so it’s somewhat surprising they went after this program — especially since $291 million is chump change on the scale of a multi-trillion-dollar budget.
We know a bit more about the second item on the list, the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program. This one allocated just over $3.2 billion to the Federal Highway Administration to award state and local governments with grants to improve walkability and transportation access, to mitigate transportation-related pollution in disadvantaged communities, and to improve transportation equity. The advocacy group Transportation for America found that of the nearly 100 awards the Biden administration announced from this program in 2023, totaling more than $3.1 billion, only 25 projects may have reached a final project agreement, per USASpending.gov. The group says this means it’s possible that nearly the entire $3 billion is up for grabs.
Other funding targeted includes more than $3.3 billion across three allocations to the General Services Administration to improve the efficiency of government buildings, prioritize lower-carbon building materials, and invest in other “emerging and sustainable” building solutions. The Government Accountability Office published a well-timed report about these three programs today, noting that while 99% of the money has been awarded, only half has been obligated, leaving more than $1.7 billion for Congress to take back.
Lastly, the proposal lists $2 billion in grants for states and local governments to use low-carbon materials in road projects. The Department of Transportation awarded $1.8 billion of the money to 39 states last year, although again, it's unclear how many of these awards have been obligated.
Having said all that, let’s assume for a moment that the full amount allocated to each of the programs was available to Congress to claw back. That would come to just under $9 billion of the $10 billion of deficit reductions the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is required to find under the special rules governing the budget bill.
But the draft bill also contains huge amounts of new spending, including allocating more than $20 billion to the United States Coast Guard for border security and $15 billion for upgrades to Air Traffic Control systems. The nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that the new fees on EVs and other vehicles could raise between $7 and $33 billion over the lifetime of the bill, which is not enough to pay for all of that. (They also note that it would barely make up for the more than $200 billion deficit in the Highway Trust Fund.) So if Republicans want to keep those provisions, they may have to find more cuts. They’ll likely have to find more anyway, depending on how much of the IRA money has been obligated.
I’ll leave you with a reminder that I’ll be repeating ad nauseam over the next few weeks or months as Congress hammers out its budget bill: This is just a first pass, and this is all subject to change. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will be holding a markup of the proposal on Wednesday, where it will debate each line and make changes before voting on whether to advance it.
Most of the Inflation Reduction Act programs come under the aegis of the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees, neither of which have published any bill text yet. But we’ll be here for you when they do.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to remove a reference to Gevo, a sustainable aviation fuel producer, which told Heatmap that it declined its awarded grant due to changed business priorities. It has also been update to include the Union of Concerned Scientists’ revenue estimate.
Chaos, uncertainty, “we don’t know yet.” These are words I’ve heard more during Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House than I’ve heard at any other time as a reporter.
That’s not to say there haven’t already been real-world impacts. Trump has gutted the staff of
key agencies dealing with climate policy and science, and shut multiple offices focused on environmental justice. His administration has taken offline thousands of web resources related to climate change and shut down a $5 billion offshore wind project that had just started construction. And then there’s the fact that now everyone, no matter what side of the energy transition they fall on, is talking about “energy dominance.”
With on-again-off-again tariffs, court-challenged funding freezes, “because I said so” regulatory rollbacks, and hazy threats to clean energy tax credits, it’s still hard to know what of Trump’s early actions back in office will stick. The long-term effects of Trump’s initial actions on the climate economy are still just estimates; projections. But I wanted to see what we could say definitively about Trump’s second first 100 days. What does the data tell us?
Trump is moving faster than he did in 2017
By the end of Trump’s first first 100 days, he had signed 24 executive orders, total. As of today, Trump has signed
20 executive orders related to environmental policy alone, out of more than 100 total.
This is partially a volume play. Trump stated in the run-up to the inauguration that he would sign 100 executive orders on his first day. He didn’t, but clearly quantity is part of the point.
Some executive orders are more potent than others. Legal experts say his order directing the attorney general to “stop the enforcement” of state climate programs is unlikely to go anywhere. It’s also not clear that his “reinvigoration of the clean coal industry” is more than wishful thinking. But he’s also terminated
environmental justice programs and positions throughout the government, and ordered agencies to expand timber production and fishing, as well as to expedite fossil fuel development and deep-sea mining.
Trump has the stock market on a yo-yo
Trump’s tariff strategy is still shifting by the day, making it hard to pin down exactly how it will affect the clean energy transition. If global tariffs on steel and aluminum remain in place, everything — fossil fuels and renewables, internal combustion cars and EVs — will feel the pain. Tariffs on China and other East Asian countries will be tough for battery and solar companies, but they could also hurt liquified natural gas companies hoping to sell into those markets.
What we do know is that markets have been hanging on Trump’s every word, and that every utterance of “tariff” has sparked a crash. Even after Trump pulled back his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, the economy still appears to be bracing for a recession.
Trump is sabotaging his fossil fuel agenda
Fears of a global recession have
also tanked oil prices. West Texas Intermediate crude oil, a common benchmark for oil prices, has traded below $65 since April 4, shortly after Trump’s global tariff announcement. Oil companies have said that $65 a barrel is the minimum price they need to profitably drill new wells.
But the trade war isn’t the only headache for U.S. producers. The same day Trump announced sweeping global tariffs, the international oil cartel OPEC+ declared that it would boost production, and will flood the market with more than 400,000 barrels per day in May. Ironically, despite his “drill, baby, drill” agenda, Trump may view both cases as a victory. He has been pushing OPEC and domestic producers alike to bring down the price of oil.
The weekly rig count, a common metric for the health of the oil industry, declined after the tariff announcement, dropping from 489 to 480 from April 4 to 11. While that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the largest drop recorded since June 2023, according to Baker Hughes. (And a reminder that the U.S. produced more oil under President Biden than ever before.) Producers don’t appear to be making rash changes on the oil patch just yet, but if prices remain low, experts expect production to plateau, or even decline.
Projects are being canceled … but Trump’s influence is hazy
Perhaps the most difficult question to suss out in the data is the extent to which Trump’s initial actions have caused clean energy projects to collapse.
A recent
report from Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, found that the first quarter of this year saw the biggest loss of investment in clean manufacturing from project cancellations and closures of the past several years. The data is stark and implies that Trump is to blame, but a closer look at the projects complicates that narrative.
For example, American battery manufacturer KORE Power announced in February that it was cancelling plans to build a $1.25 billion factory in Buckeye, Arizona, but the company had quietly
put its production site on the market in mid-January and is now trying to revive the plan as a factory retrofit rather than a new build. Freyr Battery cancelled a $2.6 billion plan to manufacture battery cells in Newnan, Georgia, but the company cited “rising interest rates, falling battery prices, a change in company leadership and a shift in its goals,” according to the Associated Press — Freyr has decided to produce solar panels instead. The closure of two of Solar4America’s manufacturing sites in California and South Carolina, first reported by PV Magazine, were likely due to waning sales in 2024.
Every example I found seemed to present a similarly muddled picture. It’s possible, and even likely, that Trump has spooked clean manufacturing companies and affected demand projections for things like batteries. But companies don’t seem to be citing federal policy explicitly in their decisions — at least not yet.
Investment in new projects also appears to be continuing alongside these cancellations. The Clean Investment Monitor report found that $9.4 billion worth of projects were announced in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the end of last year, but 23% below the first quarter of 2024.
Clean energy generation is another story, presenting cases where there’s no question Trump has played a role in killing projects. On his first day in office, Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum pulling approvals for the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, a project that would have created more than 700 jobs during construction, 20 permanent jobs, and brought millions in tax revenue into the state, but that
faced intense local opposition. The developer behind Lava Ridge, LS Power, quietly took the project off its portfolio map.
But here, too, there’s shades of gray. Many solar farms were set to receive loans from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for example, but are in limbo as the fate of the program gets battled out in the courts. Some may not survive the time it takes for that process to play out, but if the program is ultimately salvaged, other projects could take their place.
The real moment of truth for clean manufacturing and energy generation projects is coming up in Congress, which is working on a “big, beautiful” budget bill to enact Trump’s tax cut agenda. If Republicans decide to kill the tax credits that are crucial to these factories and power plants, there’ll be no question about what happens next — or what’s to blame.
In theory at least, an electrified household could play a key role in helping stabilize the grid of the future, alleviating times of peak electricity demand by providing power back to the grid and giving utilities timely warnings about hardware that may be failing. But devices used to measure and monitor power demand today, such as smart meters, aren’t advanced enough to do this type of orchestrated power management and fault detection at a granular level — thus leaving both financial and grid efficiency savings on the table.
Enter Utilidata, which just raised a $60 million Series C funding round to get its artificial intelligence-powered software module into smart meters and other pieces of grid infrastructure. This module acts as the brains of a device, and can provide utilities with localized insights into things like electricity usage levels, the operations of distributed energy resources such as home solar and batteries, anomalies in voltage data, and hardware faults. By forecasting surges or lulls in electricity demand, Utilidata can optimize power flow, and by predicting when and where faults are likely to occur, it empowers utilities to strategically upgrade their grid infrastructure, or at least come up with contingency plans before things fail.
The company’s AI system enables all of this analysis to happen at the grid edge — the point at which the electricity system enters a customer’s home — as opposed to in a centralized cloud, which reduces bandwidth needs and allows for immediate responses.
“There's enough capability at that node to optimize multiple complex decisions and create a better holistic outcome for the customer on the grid,” Utilidata CEO Josh Brumberger told me. The company did a trial recently with the Electricity Power Research Institute that showed promising cost savings and reduced grid strain. “We were able to reduce the customer’s bill by 12.5% and shave peak [usage] by 25%,” he told me.
Utilidata’s series C was led by the clean energy investor Renown Capital Partners, with support from strategic investors such as the electricity infrastructure company Quanta and Nvidia, which Utilidata partnered with to create its AI platform.
It will still be a while before Utilidata-powered smart meters allow for automated load management down to the household level, Brumberger told me, calling this the “Holy Grail” of grid operations. That’s because making load adjustments across interconnected systems is a complex task that needs to be perfectly coordinated, often with strict regulatory oversight and opt-in from participating customers. Utilities are famously cautious about adopting new technologies such as this one, as a mishap leading to a blackout can have catastrophic consequences.
A nearer term use case, Brumberger explained, would be detecting local power glitches more quickly, or forecasting when these failures might occur. For example, a new electric vehicle in the neighborhood could potentially overload local electrical distribution equipment. Utilidata could allow the utility to replace the equipment before anything goes wrong, thus enhancing grid resiliency. Insights such as this, Brumberger said, are “going to have value immediately.”
Already Utilidata has partnered with Aclara, a large manufacturer of smart meters, to install its AI module. One day, Brumberger told me, he wants to see the tech in other grid infrastructure such as transformers, EV chargers, or automatic circuit breakers known as reclosers.
Naturally, Brumberger is also excited about the potential of integrating Utilidata’s technology into data centers, telling me he sees opportunities to deploy the company’s AI modules “at the server level, at the rack level, and at the row level, all the way up to that interconnection point,” in order to help data centers run more efficiently. As the AI boom drives data center electricity demand through the roof, Utilidata is a classic example of AI helping to ameliorate the very problem it’s created.
“Every watt of energy that does not go towards compute because it's either lost or is going towards cooling is a wasted watt,” Brumberger told me. “And so the more granular and distributed your visibility and controls are, the more efficient and valuable a system you'll have.”
