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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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They were projecting Spaceballs onto the wall the first time I pulled into the Tesla Diner. To kill time while my car charged outside, I stepped into the retrofuturist Los Angeles luncheonette and spent six dollars on an oversized chocolate chip cookie. It came in a “Cyberbox,” a cardboard container meant to mimic the shape of the Cybertruck. My wife got a good laugh out of this burger box of Elon’s dreams. Now the carton sits on the kitchen counter, concealing toddler ephemera.
One taste of the Tesla Diner was plenty. But I have returned there, and it wasn’t for the wagyu beef. It’s because a strategically located mega-station is exactly what the world needs more of.
It’d be easy to argue the diner, like the Cybertruck, has been a flop. Musk’s direct involvement with the Trump administration — and the diner’s aesthetic mirroring of his particular id, right down to the movie selections and the Optimus robots handing out popcorn — made the place a target for derision and ongoing protest since its debut a year ago. The restaurant has been a bit of a disaster, too.
Yet Tesla Diner was the most successful Supercharging station in the world in the past year, delivering nearly 1,600 charging sessions per day. And though plenty of people stopped by just to post the notorious joint on social media, its achievement may have less to do with food, Instagram, or politics, and more to do with putting a bunch of plugs where the people are. The times I’ve stopped by, after all, I didn’t need an overpriced carton of fried pickles. I just needed electricity, immediately.
Strip away the restaurant and the hype, and Tesla Diner is an 80-plug fast-charging station plunked right in the middle of Hollywood. This had been a charging desert, a giant hole in the map of red dots around Greater L.A. Besides creating a bizarre new tourist attraction on Santa Monica Boulevard, the diner gave an enormous population of drivers a place to charge a Tesla — or just about any other new EV, now that most brands have moved to the NACS charging standard.
It’s an interesting case study in where, and what, charging stations should be as the nation continues to build out its various networks. Fast-charging stations tend to be built in particular kinds of places. Large outdoor malls and garages are overrepresented on charging maps because they offer plenty of parking spaces to lease and plenty of room to put in electrical infrastructure. Urban areas that don’t have those places, and instead have smaller strip malls and reasonably sized parking lots, are comparatively harder to wire up. That helps to explain the L.A. situation. This is perhaps America’s biggest electric car market, with a plethora of fast-charging stations on the affluent West side and outlying communities. Yet a huge swath of the city (all the way from the 405 to the 5) had practically nothing from Tesla for years, up until Musk decided to buy a parcel of land to build an edgelord’s drive-in.
Now that lots of charging stations exist along major highways to allow for long-distance travel, the next frontier of charging depots is the heart of the city, a place that’s been easy to overlook so far. Most of the drivers who’ve been affluent enough to become EV early adopters could charge at home and didn’t need urban fast-chargers to get around the city. But such charging depots could unlock new segments of American drivers, especially as EV prices begin to come down.
Consider, for example, that a few of the bluest counties in the country accounted for a disproportionate share of EV sales during the early part of the EV era, an unsurprising finding given the charged politics around electric cars. But those areas are not yet saturated. Many more residents would likely be interested in electrifying if they could afford the up-front cost of an EV and felt confident they could charge it — but may not have the option or the budget to install home charging infrastructure. That group needs lots of plugs close to where they live. If there’s a dearth of existing locations in which to install those chargers, then the solution may be to mimic what Musk has done with the diner: build a giant charging depot from scratch and give the people… something to do.
These issues are especially salient as stations scale up. Most urban and suburban depots to date have reached a maximum of around 20 plugs. Colossal depots with dozens of plugs had been limited to those on busy highway routes like L.A. to Las Vegas or San Francisco — at least until the diner popped up.
No, charging stations aren’t gas stations. We’re not headed toward a future with fast-charging plugs on every corner, in part because the ability to charge at home and at work negates the need for everyone to rely on public refueling. But until every house and apartment building has available plugs, we need a few more silly diners to remind people there’s plenty of juice out there.
Current conditions: The wildfires in Spain and France are burning so hot they’re creating rare pyrocumulonimbus clouds • Hurricane Genevieve has strengthened into the first Category 5 storm of 2026 as the monster cyclone rampages across the open Pacific with no immediate destination to make landfall • A tornado in Wisconsin toppled power lines, cutting off electricity to nearly 350,000 people.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Europe braces for another heat wave as France and Spain burn
Beachgoers on the shore of Lake Lacanau in southwest FranceMaximilien LAMY / AFP via Getty Images
The back-to-back record heat waves that roasted Western Europe last month killed thousands in France and Germany. The heat also dried out forests, turning woodlands on opposite sides of the Pyrenees into tinderboxes that are now ablaze in some of the worst wildfires the European Union has faced in modern history. With another heat wave now looming, firefighters are racing to contain the flames as hundreds of thousands evacuate in France and Spain. “We need to realize that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters Monday during a visit to the fire department of Bordeaux. “The situation we’re facing today is the hardest we’ve ever recorded, the hardest since World War II.” In Spain’s Valencia region, the flames are detonating buried ordinances leftover from the Spanish Civil War in the early 1930s, Reuters reported.
2. PJM is holding an emergency power auction in September
The other week, I told you when PJM Interconnection once again hit its price cap at its latest capacity auction — and still came up short of the generation needed to meet demand in 2028. On Monday, the board of the nation’s largest grid operator said in a public letter it would hold another emergency auction to find nearly 7 gigawatts of power generation to make up for the shortfall. “The board believes this reliability threat requires decisive action,” the letter stated. The move comes just weeks after PJM shattered its peak demand record after underestimating just how much electricity the grid could need during a recent heat wave in the American Northeast. It’s yet another sign of the mounting stress on the system covering 13 states as everyone from governors to the grid operator itself strive for reforms, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has written.
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3. Trump may finally move the U.S. on from Yucca Mountain
Nuclear waste is a political paradox. Critics of atomic energy say that the radioactive waste produced during fission cancel out the benefits of using the most efficient source of carbon-free power humanity has yet harnessed. In the 1980s, the federal government took control of nuclear waste and set about building the world’s first permanent repository to store spent fuel underground for centuries. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was designated as the debut location for such a facility. Opponents in the Silver State fought back, imagining that Washington was subjecting Nevada to dangers akin to the atomic bomb tests that once took place in its deserts. In 2010 — in a move that nonpartisan Government Accountability Office later pegged as an entirely political, rather than technical, motive — President Barack Obama halted work on a project the then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted kiboshed. The problem is that federal law dictates Yucca Mountain be completed as the first nuclear waste repository before other sites can be considered. No one in Congress has stepped up to make the change. As a result, the U.S. — operator of the world’s largest nuclear fleet and wannabe exporter to countries who want to get into the atomic energy game — has had no clear long-term plan for dealing with nuclear waste in 16 years.
The Trump administration is trying to change that. The Department of Energy has floated plans for nuclear innovation campuses where cutting-edge recycling companies could test out new technologies to reprocess waste into medical isotopes and fresh fuel. But E&E News reported Monday that the administration is poised to press Congress to update federal law to allow the U.S. to finally move on from Yucca Mountain. A leaked document the newswire obtained outlines the administration’s plans to instead press states to take on waste repositories and recycling facilities, in line with the Energy Department’s campus idea. That may not be easy. Even Texas, whose government has sought to roll out the red carpet for nuclear developers recently unsuccessfully sued federal regulators to the Supreme Court to block construction of a waste storage facility.
4. Supreme Court tees up a new test of FERC’s independence
Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of President Donald Trump’s right to fire commissioners from previously independent agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees pipelines and the grid. On Monday, E&E News published a feature examining the implications for FERC at a particularly sensitive time in its history, when a once-sleepy agency is increasingly facing scrutiny over the health of the U.S. grid. Experts were mixed on the effects. Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University, called Trump “a loose cannon” with “no justification for firing any FERC Commissioner.” Commissioner David LaCerte, a Republican, cheered the Supreme Court for overturning what he said was an unlawful restriction put in place a century ago that limited the White House’s ability to fire any commissioners for anything beyond poor performance. “If a commissioner is going to buckle under that pressure and compromise their integrity because they are afraid of being fired, well, they probably didn’t deserve to be in this job in the first place,” he said during the FERC meeting. But fellow Republican Mark Christie, who previously served as FERC chair and whom Matthew dubbed “the most interesting man” on the commission, said that while he agrees with the court’s decision, open requisitions remain as to what it would mean in practice. “If FERC is now completely under the supervision of the president, is the executive branch going to say how to decide a rate case?” said Christie. “That to me is the single biggest question.”
The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is gutting funding for public transit, walkways, and bike lanes. In a letter outlining the agency’s spending priorities to the Senate, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed eliminating the Highway Trust Fund’s mass transit account and slashing funding for infrastructure that provides for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, bike lanes, and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. That’s not all: Smart Cities Dive reported that a competitive grant program to fund solutions to traffic safety would scrap options that include public transit improvements and tolling from even being considered.
5. China’s dominance over solar inverters peaked in 2024
China produces most of the world’s inverters for solar panels. It’s increasingly a problem. Last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. had found “killswitch” devices in some inverters, suggesting that Beijing could — in theory — remotely disable solar panels when demand is high on the grid, or try to cause frequency problems like those that triggered the great Iberian blackout of 2025. At the start of this month, I told you the Federal Communications Commission was weighing a ban on Chinese inverters. If you share the Trump administration’s concerns, there’s good news: China’s command over the global inverter market peaked in 2024, according to new data from the research division at PV Tech. Europe, meanwhile, has emerged as a major manufacturer, hitting over 100 gigawatts of factory capacity this year. The U.S. is now at 40 gigawatts, while India is at 20 gigawatts. You’d be reasonable to wonder if these are just Chinese companies setting up shop in Europe. But you’d be wrong. “What distinguishes Europe’s inverter manufacturing expansion from other sectors, particularly solar modules, is the composition of its manufacturing base,” analyst Mollie McCorkindale wrote in the magazine. “As of 2026, over 90% of Europe’s 100-gigawatt manufacturing capacity comes from European-headquartered companies.”
THE KICKER
Everyone knows the U.S. is veering away from offshore wind, and diligent readers of this newsletter (for whom I feel such affection) may recall that Japan is on a parallel trajectory. Elsewhere, however, offshore wind is booming. Romania, whose coastline makes up a single-digit percentage of its mostly landlocked borders, is the latest country to make big plans for seaward turbines. Bucharest is now targeting nearly 12 gigawatts of offshore wind, Renewables Now reported.
Enormous wildfires are still burning in France and Spain. “We're facing a completely unprecedented fire,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, comparing the situation to World War II. The main fire in Gironde, a southwestern department along the Atlantic coast, have consumed more than 100,000 acres and forced roughly 200,000 people to evacuate.
There’s little sign the fires are under control in either country. In France, the blazes created a pyrocumulonimbus cloud — a towering, thundering “fire storm” that sometimes forms in the western United States but is not often observed in western Europe. Some fires have come within several miles of Bordeaux, the country’s sixth-largest metropolitan area and a longtime center of the wine industry. In Spain, enormous wildfires near Madrid, Ávila, and Toledo have killed one and displaced roughly another 79,000 people.
Firefighters are working fast, in part because a heatwave is forecast for the continent later this week. But of course it is hot — it is high summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and we are having a particularly hot year. 2026 now looks likely to be the world’s second-warmest year ever, and it has a better than one-third chance of being the warmest.
In the near term, expect more climate-addled disasters. The Pacific Ocean has slipped into its El Niño phase, which will likely spin off more extreme storms, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. Recent modeling suggests it could be the most intense El Niño ever measured. Writing for his newsletter “The Climate Brink,” the climate researcher (and Heatmap contributor) Zeke Hausfather recently warned: “It looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began — it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.”
How do we know this next El Niño will be bad? The most intense El Niño on record occurred from late 2015 to 2016, when sea surface temperatures in a benchmark region of the Pacific Ocean were 2.75 degrees Celsius warmer than normal. (That’s nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Those searing sea temperatures released huge amounts of heat into the atmosphere and eventually made 2016 the warmest year ever recorded. Today, a decade later, 2016 remains the fourth warmest year on record, coming in only under 2024, 2023, and 2025, per NOAA data.
But as Zeke writes, the middle 80% of modeled outcomes for this year’s El Niño are already projected to match or exceed that 2016 anomaly. The median forecast for this year’s event, in other words, would shatter the previous record. “The models are forecasting something outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed,” he writes. The National Weather Service agrees that there is an 81% chance of an event forming “that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950,” and it says odds are better than 97% that the anomaly will stick around through spring 2027.
Scientists and activists once hoped that when global warming’s effects became unignorable, the public would take action. But disasters haven’t produced durable climate concern, and public attention has dissipated with every news cycle — and become ever more pessimistic. There are moments, however, when successive extremes can keep climate change more prominently in the public conversation. The years that followed the last mega-El Niño in 2016 made up one such period. If we are headed for another now, then experts should be ready with ideas not only for slowing and reversing the growth of heat-trapping emissions, but also for adapting our societies and infrastructure for our warming world. It’s clear we are going to need them.
The other mega-trend?
This will be a big week for understanding the U.S. energy economy’s most important trend. A handful of tech companies driving the artificial intelligence boom — namely, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon — will report their quarterly earnings on Wednesday and Thursday. These companies are behind some of the country’s largest AI data center projects and therefore some of its most sizable planned power plants — clean and otherwise.
Last week, when Alphabet boosted its capital expenditure for this year by another $15 billion, the market rebelled and sent its shares tumbling. If investors’ interest in financing mega-scale data center projects is waning, then it could affect the electricity economy for years to come. In any case, we’ll know more soon. Rivian will also report its earnings this week.
Beachgoers on the shore of Lake Lacanau in southwest FranceMaximilien LAMY / AFP via Getty Images
