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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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Current conditions: Heavy rainfall in Florida and the Southwest caused flooding that forced local officials to enact emergency Election Day measures to make accommodate voters • Temperatures are up to nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit amid a major rainstorm in Puerto Rico, the most populous U.S. territory, where the limits of federal representation mean there was no election yesterday • The eastern Pacific basin has broken multiple records with 24 named storms and 13 hurricanes so far, and nearly four weeks before the season ends.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Democrats shellack
The next governor and senator from Texas, both Democrats.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In 2010, then-President Barack Obama introduced the term “shellacking” into the American political lexicon when he described the depth of Democrats’ loss in the midterm elections. Sixteen years later, Democrats are the ones doing the shellacking. The party surged to victory in places long considered deep-red GOP strongholds. Kansas elected Adam Hamilton as its first Democratic U.S. senator in 94 years. Texas hadn’t elected a Democrat statewide in 32 years, yet gave the party a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion. South Carolina’s incoming Democratic senator is its first since 1998. Hours before polls closed in the nation’s westernmost reaches, Democrats had won control over both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Ahead of the vote, I spoke to half a dozen experts on what we should expect from the new Democratic Congress. Among the energy policies the party will want to enact: Restrictions on data centers, a restoration of renewable energy tax credits, and the creation of a new tax credit to support batteries. Among the issues expected to see congressional probes: Trump’s gutting of climate rules, funding cuts for clean energy, deals to kill offshore wind projects, and the redirection of Department of Energy funding from green projects to dirty ones. Aligning with Democrats on the need for clean energy tax credits wasn’t enough to save many Republicans in blue and purple states. At least nine Republicans who signed at least one public letter calling on the Trump administration to preserve tax credits for renewables lost reelection Tuesday night, including Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, David Valadao of California, Mike Lawler of New York, Thomas Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, and Ryan Mackenzie and Rob Bresnahan, both of Pennsylvania.
2. What else to read on the election
To go deeper into the outcomes of the election, check out these stories by my colleagues:
Matthew Zeitlin on how Democrats took control over Georgia’s utility commission, the agency that approved the country’s only two new nuclear reactors this century.
3. Green groups are working with tech giants on data center standards
Strange bedfellows are coming together to form the Responsible Data Center Development Collaborative. In an election night scoop, The Hill reported that green groups such as the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council were working with Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google to develop “a common national framework for responsible data development.” The document, leaked to the publication, details the need for “durable economic development,” “more affordable, reliable, and emissions-free energy,” and “community agency and support for responsibly developed projects.” Other parties involved in the effort include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Oracle.
The world’s biggest banks, meanwhile, are once again making more money from green energy projects than fossil fuel ones. For a fifth straight year, according to a Bloomberg analysis published Tuesday, the 2025 revenue from servicing debt on climate-related financing topped $3 billion, eclipsing the $2.9 billion from deals for oil, gas, and coal producers.
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4. Russia is building a major new uranium fuel plant
The U.S. is racing to replace the Russian enriched uranium that fuels roughly a quarter of its fleet of civilian nuclear plants before federal law bans imports at the end of next year. Industry sources tell me that utilities have about enough fuel to get through the end of the decade before the absence of Russian uranium starts forcing reactors to shut down. Some still expect Trump to find a way to intervene, like when he unilaterally relaxed sanctions on Russian diesel last month. But the few U.S. uranium enrichers that survived the 1990s and 2000s, when cheap imports put much of the domestic industry out of business, are scrambling to erect new centrifuges and pump out more fuel. A new player, the Peter Thiel-backed General Matter, is on track to begin construction as early as next year, as I reported last week. On Monday, Urenco USA, the American subsidiary of the European enrichment giant, announced that it had churned out its first shipment of LEU+, the higher-enriched version of low-enrich uranium that U.S. utilities are pioneering. The Kremlin, however, is beefing up its own operations to maintain its share of the global market. On Tuesday, NucNet reported that Russia planned to build a new facility to process uranium from two mining sites in Zabaikalsky Krai, a landlocked federal jurisdiction in the Russian Far East covering much of the area once known as Transbaikal. The two deposits, located more than 3,700 miles from Moscow, are part of one of the largest volcanic-hosted uranium clusters in the world. Russia is developing the new processing plant in hopes of shoring up its supplies for export.
Meanwhile, Germany is showing signs of the energy vulnerabilities that may have encouraged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly five years ago. In 2021, Germany and much of Western Europe burned through its stores of natural gas to make up for a shortfall of wind power during a “dunkelflaute,” a period in which previously forecasted gusts never blew. That intensified the pain when Brussels was seeking to cut off Russian supplies and the Kremlin throttled the flow of gas into pipelines. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Germany has entered winter with its lowest gas stocks on record, far below the EU average.
5. California court rules the state’s first carbon capture project illegal
A California court ruled this week in favor of activists seeking to shut down a first-of-a-kind carbon capture project in inland Kern County, north of Santa Barbara. The decision found that the Carbon TerraVault I, which stores CO2 captured from the California Resources Corporation’s Elk Hills cryogenic natural gas-processing facility, broke the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to evaluate, disclose and mitigate potential environmental effects from the facility. The facility, which started running in May, must now halt all operations until it can carry out a new environmental review. “This is a tremendous victory for Kern County communities,” Lupe Martinez, an advocate with the community group Delano Guardians, said in a statement. “We live in one of the most polluted regions in the nation, yet the county and powerful corporations attempted to push forward a project that threatened our air, water, and public health without conducting the proper environmental review required by law.”
THE KICKER
It feels almost biblical. One of the world’s biggest mining companies is facing a brutal invasion of toads. Rio Tinto plans to spend $20 million to battle what the Financial Times called “a marauding can toad that is threatening to encroach on Australia’s iron ore-rich Pilbara region.” The company is working with scientists to establish a “kill zone” between the Indian Ocean and the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. While the amphibians don’t affect Rio Tinto’s mining operations, an invasive pest that upsets the region’s unique biodiversity threatens to make future permitting harder since regulators will face new pressures to protect endangered native species.
Democrat Zack Mullock unseated Representative Jeff Van Drew, one of offshore wind’s biggest foes, on Tuesday night in the race for New Jersey’s second district. But while Mullock is a fan of renewable energy, he’s still a man of the south Jersey shore — and unlikely to be a champion for turbines off his coast.
District 2 encompasses the entire lower quarter of the state, covering six coastal counties from Atlantic City down to the tip of Cape May and around to the Delaware Bay. The area is a hotbed for offshore wind opposition, where groups like Protect our Coasts NJ have filed legal challenges against almost every wind project proposed in the region.
After heading to Congress in 2019, Van Drew, who was previously a Democrat, switched parties and became a key ally to this movement. He called for a moratorium on offshore wind development, held hearings on offshore wind “industrialization”, and requested that the Government Accountability Office investigate the industry. He also worked with the Trump administration to block projects that were under construction.
During a debate in late October, Mullock accused Van Drew of flip flopping on wind, arguing that the congressman was a staunch supporter of the industry during his decade-long tenure in the New Jersey legislature. Mullock, who is currently serving his second term as mayor of the city of Cape May, summed up his own position by citing a resolution he signed in 2023 calling for a moratorium on surveying and acoustic testing for offshore wind development pending an investigation into a spate of whale deaths. He signed it due to “concerns” about the environment and commercial fishing, he said.
“I believe very much in our future with renewable energy,” he said. “We need to go full steam ahead with solar panels. And yes we should do wind where it is appropriate, where it doesn't hurt our environment and it doesn't hurt our commercial fishing industry.”
Mullock’s campaign website says he supports federal investments in renewable energy and incentives for energy-efficient homes. He also wants “stricter enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,” and to fund coastal resiliency and other “smart infrastructure” projects that protect against climate impacts. He also campaigned in support of a data center moratorium.
We’ve seen enough: If this was the data center election, it was a really bad night for the industry.
Democratic campaigns and their affiliated Super PACs spent bigly on data center-themed attack ads. The ads came in various flavors. Some ads painted a vote for tax cuts as aiding data center developers. Others brought up candidates’ previous support for data centers or stock the candidate may have held in the tech industry or AI infrastructure developers. As Election Day approached, the data center industry sought to bat back claims that their sector’s poor reputation with the electorate would sway the results. People may have soured on their industry, they argued, but people weren’t going to vote based on that position.
Results are still coming in, but so far congressional races heavily featuring these data center attacks are heavily going in Democrats’ favor. In addition, these races have so profoundly shifted that it’ll be challenging for the industry to argue they played no role in the outcome.
Some of the most illustrative examples are obvious. In Georgia, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms campaigned on a statewide data center moratorium and won control of the governor’s mansion, becoming the first black woman to ever lead a U.S. state. Similar results in Ohio where Amy Acton flipped party control of the governor’s seat with a campaign that included going hard against data centers. In Pennsylvania, two Democrats who focused on data centers in their races have flipped Republican districts: Scranton mayor Paige Cognetti and firefighter Bob Brooks. In New Jersey, Cape May mayor Zack Mullock rode data center attacks to defeat Rep. Jeff Van Drew, the biggest opponent of the offshore wind industry. In Virginia, Democrat Shannon Taylor rode data center-laden attacks to take control of the Richmond area congressional seat from Rep. Rob Wittman.
If you’re arguing this election was decided by data centers, your best proof point: Democrat Gina Hinojosa has taken control of the governor's mansion in Texas, defeating incumbent Greg Abbott, who’d sought recently to take a hard line against the industry. Hinojosa ran on going further, calling to pass a law completely pausing data center development across one of the industry’s favorite states. She won a decisive victory. So did Democratic Texas Agriculture Commissioner candidate Clayton Tucker, who I explained months ago became one of anti-data center Facebook’s favorite online personalities.
But it makes sense that data centers would matter a lot in Texas, which could be compared to Virginia in terms of their buildout. When you inspect the election results more closely, they tell a more complicated story about the upper boundaries of these data center attacks.
For decades, Greenville and Spartanburg County have been GOP vote strongholds and reliable for both Republican congressional candidates and statewide campaigns. The congressional district gave Donald Trump at least a 20-point cushion in the 2024 presidential election, according to Decision Desk HQ. Last week, I explained for subscribers to The Fight how Courtney McClain, a novice candidate living one mile from a controversial data center proposal, was running against incumbent Rep. William Timmons. I couldn’t find much in the way of online ad spending on either side in this race and it’s never been on the radar of most political observers as a campaign that could somehow flip party control. But the data center debate in Spartanburg County has been immense.
Tonight, Timmons kept his ordinarily ruby red district by slim single digits after running even for most of the night. But this swing was essentially the same as the national margin. And because Timmons didn’t lose, this actually feels like a crucial distinction – data centers were not deciding races themselves in all cases. Democrat Annie Andrews defeated Republican Darlene Graham in a result driven by Democratic overperformance and GOP underperformance in this area, but it’s challenging to tie this result to the data center issue at all. Anything from the economy and the Iran War to Graham’s deceased brother and his baggage could be blamed for this result from this heavily evangelical region.
However, it will be challenging for the data center sector to differentiate themselves from this outcome, especially since a pro-data center Super PAC – Building the Future – publicly waded into the race in support of Graham only to lose. “Darlene Graham’s loss is a black eye for the data center industry,” wrote Teddy Schleifer of The New York Times on election night.
The same story played out in Georgia’s 1st district, which includes the city of Savannah. OpenAI is developing a controversial data center project in Effingham County, northwest of Savannah and the congressional race – which like South Carolina’s 4th had comparatively little spending – has been chock full of data center mudslinging, with the Democrat Amanda Hollowell calling for broader moratoria on development.
Effingham County went for Trump by almost 50 points in 2024. As of this story’s publication, the Republican, Jim Kingston, is winning by a single percentage point with 93% of the vote in. Most of what’s left is in Effington. Should this candidate win, it’s safe to say it’s because voters in this county looked past data centers, or did not link their vote for a national candidate to the local development.
On Election Night, Effingham County formally tabled any decision on the OpenAI data center. So at least on the ground level, people are paying close attention to these results.
The next governor and senator from Texas, both Democrats.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
