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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.
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is gaining wind intensity this week, bringing flooding rain and storm surge to the southeastern U.S. • Hurricane Humberto, now a Category 4 storm, is passing west of Bermuda, bringing marine hazards to the U.S. East Coast • Typhoon Bualoi is pummeling the Philippines and Vietnam, where it’s already killed a dozen people.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Today’s the last day to claim the electric vehicle tax credit
If you were planning to cash in on the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, you’d better make moves. Today’s the last day to claim the so-called 30D tax credit. Congress moved the expiration date for the writeoff to September 30 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
That doesn’t mean all government incentives for EVs are going away. New York still offers a $2,000 “Drive Clean Rebate” for some vehicles, and California offers up to $7,000 in rebates. Prices for new electric cars are still higher than those for comparable internal combustion vehicles, a frustratingly persistent condition the federal tax credit was meant to help address. Owning an EV has its own rewards, however, including lower fuel and maintenance costs over time. For more on how to go about choosing an EV, here’s Andrew Moseman’s guide from our Decarbonize Your Life series.
2. Trump offers $625 million to reopen and ‘modernize’ coal plants
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
The Trump administration is opening more than 13 million acres of federal land to leasing for new coal mines. And it’s providing funding to keep demand for coal roaring. The Department of Energy announced Monday it will offer $625 million to upgrade, reopen, and “modernize” coal-fired power plants across the country.
It’s a sign of the trend Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin clocked in July: “Global coal demand is rising,” he wrote, “and America wants in.” Indeed, in a press release, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright boasted that the new funding would “keep our nation’s coal plants operating” and would ultimately help lower rising electricity prices. “Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race,” Wright said. “Coal built the greatest industrial engine the world has ever known, and with President Trump’s leadership, it will help do so again.”
3. Trump cuts funding for climate adaptation research
The Trump administration is shutting down or shrinking roughly one third of the federal offices that track bird populations after hurricanes, map megafire risks in the Midwest, figure out new ways to fight invasive plants, and prepare communities’ stormwater drains against intense flooding. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers “are expected to drastically wind down and possibly close after Tuesday because of a lack of funds,” The Washington Post reported Monday. The centers in the South Central, Northeast, and Pacific Islands regions, which “collectively cover about one-third of the U.S. population and are funded under the Interior Department,” are potentially facing permanent closure.
The shuttering isn’t linked to a potential government shutdown, and appears planned as part of the Trump administration’s broader cuts to federal research. “We’re not willing to just drop everything and walk away,” Bethany Bradley, the co-director of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center and a University of Massachusetts professor, told the newspaper. “But the reality is we can’t do this for free.”
4. Data center giants propose fix for PJM’s electricity shortages
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, utility giant Constellation, and power company Talen came together to propose a way to meet electricity needs in the nation’s largest power grid. Under their plan, the PJM Interconnection would allow large power users to volunteer for time-limited periods of reducing electricity demand when the grid is stressed. The proposal also outlines plans for time-limited use of backup generation. If making the load more flexible doesn’t work, PJM would increase the supply of firm power through procurement.
The pitch comes in response to an earlier mandatory curtailment proposal from PJM, which drew fierce blowback from many of the companies that wrote up this alternative. (“Everyone hates it,” Matthew wrote.) As analyst Aniruddh Mohan noted, PJM ultimately withdrew its initial load flexibility proposal.
5. PG&E unveils $73 billion spending plan
Pacific Gas & Electric announced plans to spend $73 billion on upgrades to the electrical grid in California to meet the surge in demand from data centers. PG&E, as it’s known, has been deemed responsible for multiple large-scale wildfires in recent years, incurring billions in damages. As the utility told investors on a call Monday, the new investment plan “comes on the heels” of new liability reforms in the state. Under Senate Bill 254, the state expanded its wildfire fund by $18 billion and “acknowledged that the utilities and their customers cannot continue to carry the full burden of climate-driven catastrophic wildfires, especially when the utility has acted prudently,” PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said, according to Power magazine. The utility had filed a proposal in March to build 700 miles of underground power lines between 2026 and 2028 and complete 500 miles of additional wildfire safety system upgrades by next year.
THE KICKER
Fervo Energy, the company using fracking technology to harness the planet’s molten energy, is undeniably leading the race to commercialize next-generation geothermal. But a clear second-place contender emerged Tuesday when XGS Energy released the results from its first commercial test, the company told Heatmap exclusively. The startup’s system outperformed the executives’ expectations, setting the stage for full-scale development. While Fervo’s technology represents what’s known as “enhanced” geothermal system, XGS’ approach is what’s known as “advanced” geothermal systems that rely on closed-loop infrastructure, as Matthew previously explained.
The geothermal startup XGS Energy has now completed four months of tests to see whether its technology can maintain steady production of heat at temperatures above what’s needed to generate energy. Over 3,000 hours, the company monitored the drilling process and checked how heat flowed from its wells, the status of their temperature, and how precisely XGS’ mathematical predictions matched the outcome of the testing.
The results, which the company shared exclusively with Heatmap, were “almost too good,” XGS CEO Josh Prueher told me.
“Had we been within 10% of predictive performance, we would have been pretty happy with the outcome,” Prueher said. “Turns out we were within 2% under a variety of different parameters.”
“It worked like a charm,” he said.
To understand what makes XGS Energy stand out among the geothermal startups racing to commercialize next-generation technology, it helps to compare the company to its fellow Houston-based rival that’s currently leading the sector, Fervo Energy. Unlike Fervo, XGS doesn’t use fracking technology to drill horizontal wells in pursuit of hot, dry rocks from which to harvest energy.
Instead, XGS drills vertical wells and inserts a closed steel pipe with water and fills the gap between the metal and the rock with a patented slurry that conducts heat. Technology like Fervo’s requires pumping cold water over the fractured hot rocks to harvest heat. But with its method, XGS claims, it avoids losing any water.
The testing took place off the US-395 highway in a volcanic field in California’s Mojave desert, sandwiched between the eastern edge of the Sequoia National Park and western border of Death Valley National Park. The geothermal field XGS tapped is already actively producing energy for the Coso Operating Company, which runs a 270-megawatt geothermal power plant on the land. The results, the company said, showed the “unprecedented predictability and active control of field performance” of XGS’ technology “versus other geothermal systems, which are subject to complex and continuously changing subsurface reservoir conditions.”
At least one outside observer agreed. “This is impressive, and something to be proud of,” Advait Arun, an energy analyst and senior associate at the think tank Center for Energy Enterprise who co-authored a recent report on next-generation geothermal, told me.
While the 3,000 hours of testing still falls short of the year’s worth of data Fervo has produced at one of its sites, it’s the longest any other competitor in the space has successfully demonstrated its approach so far, Arun said.
“These guys would be second to Fervo in terms of their ability to prove a commercial-scale performance test,” he added.
XGS is now poised to build a 150-megawatt power plant for Meta’s New Mexico data centers. Even after that’s complete, however, Prueher said the surrounding area has nearly 3 gigawatts of untapped heat. In California, where the company is headquartered and carried out its demonstration project, there’s a growing need for clean power sources that don’t further tax the depleted water table.
“A lot of the historical sensitivities around developing in California — a state where, like many others, water usage for industrial development is kind of a no-no — because we don’t need water, we have some real advantages,” Prueher said.
At a moment when surging demand from data centers is supercharging dealmaking in the electricity sector, Prueher said XGS is looking beyond the boom from the artificial intelligence buildout.
“It’s not about data centers,” he said. “It really is just the fundamental power needs of California. With the restrictions around water usage, we line up really, really well for California.”
For now, the company remains focused on the U.S. But Prueher said XGS is well suited to export its technology to East Asia, as well, where countries along the Pacific Rim have vast geothermal potential and growing electricity demand but limited development. XGS already has ties to the Philippines and “may actually be subsurface” — i.e. digging wells — there by the end of 2026, Prueher told me.
The “big enchilada,” he said, would be establishing a foothold in Japan, where the onsen hotspring industry has long protested geothermal development they say could diminish the resource that makes the ancient bathhouse tradition possible. Prueher told me his technology mitigates concerns over fracking-induced earthquakes, as well.
For now, he said, his main market is in the fast-growing Southwest. The executive compared this moment to 2021, when he worked at a battery company. That February, Winter Storm Uri collapsed the Texas grid as natural gas pipes froze and demand for electricity to heat homes designed to stay cool in a typically arid climate skyrocketed. Back then, he said, batteries were “still a pretty new asset class.”
“People were still uncertain about how it would perform,” Prueher said. But his company was “able to keep our batteries up and operating 100% of the time, no one minute of downtime during that entire episode.”
“From a market perspective, the storm showed that, if you can bring this new type of technology into the market, it can really deliver remarkable value,” he added. “We made 10 years of revenue in six days.”
In a lot of ways, he went on, “this is the same thing.”
“We’ve proven a technology is reliable,” Prueher said. “It works at commercial scale over a period of time. We would regard this as a real pivot point in the industry.”
Electricity prices are rising and voters are mad about it — two facts that might seem to add up to a political victory for Democrats.
Environmental groups and elected officials alike are gearing up to use electricity prices against Trump, citing the president’s multi-pronged assault on renewables as the problem and promising to immediately bring them down as the solution. “Cheap is clean and clean is cheap,” Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz said at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, echoing what has become essentially a universal talking point among climate activists.
The problem with that message, however, is that lowering electricity prices is really hard. In reality, the responsibility for high prices can’t be laid that the feet of any one person, party, or governmental body. What’s worse for Democrats: the voters seem to agree.
That’s not to say Trump isn’t giving Democrats a fighting chance.
“What’s interesting politically is that Trump started this term with cost of living being his single strongest issue, and now it’s his weakest,” Democratic political strategist David Shor said at an event hosted by the moderate Democratic group Third Way during New York Climate Week last week.
“A lot of the Democratic attacks trying to blame these energy price increases on Republicans have done well in our testing,” Shor said, and that there was “potential” for such attacks to be effective.
But the public’s views on energy go back further than January 20.
Trump won the 2024 election in part because of public outrage at rising prices across the board. Polling done during the campaign showed that Trump both had an advantage on cost of living issues in general and energy in particular. A Third Way poll conducted early last year showed that Trump had strong advantages on energy production, supporting manufacturing, reducing the cost of energy and gasoline, and the economy in general.
“While Biden was president, energy was one of his biggest vulnerabilities,” Shor said on the panel. “The flip side though, though, is that Democrats aren’t in charge anymore.”
According to polling by Heatmap Pro, voters largely don’t pin the fault for high electricity prices on Washington, D.C. They are more likely to blame “more demand,” their “ electricity utility,” or their “state government,” with roughly equal numbers blaming “the Biden administration and Democrats” and “the Trump administration and Republicans,” with predictable partisan splits.
And while the Trump administration is undoing tax credits for clean energy projects and unleashing regulatory hellfire on existing projects, the electricity price hikes we’re already experiencing are largely due to the cost of the poles and wires that transit and distribute electricity. In some cases, sharply rising demand has played a role, especially in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest covered by PJM Interconnection.
Because the bulk of high energy costs are due to investments that have already been made — and can likely only be slowed down by new investments in longer-distance transmission — politicians are unlikely to find a way to lower costs, so much as perhaps slow down their increase. “Unfortunately, electricity rates are not going to go down. Our goal here is to minimize how much they go up,” Gretchen Kershaw, vice president of strategy at Grid Strategies, said on the same Climate Week panel as Shor’s.
Any politician running as a challenger can simply say that rising electricity prices are bad and force incumbents to take responsibility for it, even if they don’t have a plan to lower prices in the short term.
However, Democrats are in charge in some places that have seen large price increases, and that has tripped up their ability to make electricity price increases a marquee issue.
New Jersey, for instance, not only has some of the highest retail electricity prices in the nation, it has seen substantial price increases over the last five years as the state’s electricity market, PJM, has faced billions of dollars in new costs for capacity. Just in the past year, retail electricity prices in New Jersey have risen by over 25%, to around 25 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Along with Virginia, New Jersey’s gubernatorial election — held the year after the presidential election, is often considered a kind of mid-mid-term temperature-check for the country as a whole.
New Jersey is a solidly Democratic state, although one that swung considerably towards Trump in 2024. The Democratic nominee in this year’s governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill, is the favorite and should be able to ride the backlash against Trump to Drumthwacket, a.k.a. the New Jersey governor’s mansion. But with electricity prices at the center of the race, she has failed to dominate the polls.
Her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, has tried to pin the price increases on progressive policy, namely support for renewables, especially the troubled offshore wind industry, as well as efforts to prevent new fossil fuel power plants from opening.
One anti-Sherrill ad quotes the congresswoman saying, “We need to move into clean power. It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person you’ll do it,” and describes her price freeze plan as just a way to “lock in” already high prices.
Sherrill’s campaign has hit back at the Republican Governors Association, which ran the ad, pointing out that the quote was actually Sherrill explaining how not to talk about climate and energy policy. In other words, Sherrill is getting tagged with the argument that she explicitly says Democrats should reject.
There’s some indication that voters in New Jersey at least give an edge to Republicans on energy and electricity questions. In a Quinnipiac poll showing Sherrill leading Ciattarelli 49% to 41%, she had just a two-point lead on electricity prices, specifically, with 17% of the respondents not having an opinion.
In short, Sherrill was right to be concerned about how voters perceive Democrats when it comes to electricity prices.
“Democrats have to be very careful,” Shor said. “If you just ask people ‘what party do you trust more to keep energy prices down’? Historically, that’s something that Republicans have massive advantages on.”
Stacks at the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
