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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.
The car bubble couldn’t last forever. For years now, the steadily rising cost of new vehicles has led American drivers to take on longer and longer car loans — six, seven, even eight years, as opposed to the four or five that used to be typical. The average new car sale in America crept up to nearly $50,000 in November, a seemingly unsustainable number for a country drowning in debt.
But as 2025 draws to a close, we’re seeing more signs that Americans are starting to change their behavior, according to the Wall Street Journal. With people keeping their old cars even longer and more shopping used, new car sales saw very little growth this year, and are projected to look flat again in 2026. Even the seemingly bulletproof full-size trucks that make up the backbone of the U.S. auto industry aren’t immune. Kelley Blue Book says the Ram 1500, which has had a lock on the number three spot in all U.S. auto sales behind the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, is slated to drop out of the top three this year.
A bear market sounds especially bleak for electric vehicles. EVs, after all, have long suffered an affordability problem, and the Trump administration this fall killed off the federal tax break meant to make them more cost-competitive with fossil fuel vehicles. A country of cost-conscious drivers is even less likely to pay a premium for battery power.
Yet as a new year dawns, EVs in America might be better positioned than you think.
For one thing, this isn’t the EV market of a couple years ago. That reckoning for too-expensive pickup trucks? Electrics already went through it. Consider the Ford F-150 Lightning, which was quietly discontinued this month. The fully electric version of America’s best-selling vehicle was an amazing piece of technology, with breakthrough features like the ability to back up a home’s power supply with the truck battery. But the pickup cost a fortune because of how much battery it takes to make an EV truck do the kinds of things a gas-powered F-150 can do. The inflated price, along with many truck buyers’ reluctance to go EV for political and cultural reasons, led to disappointing sales and shattered any dreams of an easy electrification of America’s massive pickup truck market.
As a result, electric pickup trucks were already moving toward the smaller, more affordable end of the market even before the F-150 Lightning died. Ford’s maintains that its mission to fix its flailing EV division will start with a far more affordable $30,000 midsize pickup. One of the most anticipated electric models is the bare-bones Slate truck, which is slated (pun intended) to start in the mid $20,000s.
We’re also on the cusp of seeing more new EVs that are cost-competitive with gas-burners even without the big tax credits. I’ve repeatedly lauded Chevy for delivering a version of the Equinox EV at $35,000, which helped the vehicle become the third-best-selling electric in America (and top seller that’s not a Tesla). A variety of electric cars arriving in 2026 will come in close to the $30,000 mark or below, a group that includes Toyota’s battery-powered version of its C-HR small crossover and the promising revivals of both the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt.
No, we still don’t have the $25,000 EV that would compete directly with a Toyota Corolla. But there’s ample opportunity for electrics to compete at the budget end of the car market, with no economy car segment left to speak of. KBB notes that the car industry this year offered just five models that truly cost less than $25,000, all things considered, down from 36 such vehicles in 2017. The car companies went all-in on more expensive — and more lucrative — trucks and SUVs as Americans displayed a limitless hunger for them. Now that buyers are finally curbing that appetite, there is a window of opportunity for the new wave of economy-focused EVs.
That’s not to say the EV market is headed for smooth sailing. As Mack Hogan at InsideEVs has written, battery-powered cars still have a major problem with “uncompetitive” models. Beyond the familiar success stories — Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, and a few others — the car market is littered with EVs that sell just a few hundred or thousand models per year, often because they simply don't measure up to their gas rivals on cost or performance. It’s hard to see how those vehicles find their place, especially when some of them still suffer from disappointing battery ranges and driving comfort that doesn’t measure up to their more polished petroleum-powered cousins.
Still, there’s reason for hope that some of the affordable electrics will find their footing among penny-counting drivers, especially as more of them are enticed by the potential of saying goodbye to pumping gas and paying for oil changes. Because they started out expensive, EVs have yet to be seen as economy cars — in the United States, at least. But with more affordable models arriving just as the car market starts to creak, that could soon change.
Current conditions: New Orleans is expecting light rain with temperatures climbing near 90 degrees Fahrenheit as the city marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina • Torrential rains could dump anywhere from 8 to 12 inches on the Mississippi Valley and the Ozarks • Japan is sweltering in temperatures as high as 104 degrees.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump’s social media company is getting into fusion energy
In a Mad Libs of a merger story, President Donald Trump’s social media company inked a $6 billion deal Thursday to combine with fusion energy company TAE Technologies in a bid to start construction on “the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant” next year. It’s a lofty claim, to put it minimally. Once the darling of private fusion investors, TAE has since fallen behind rivals pursuing technological approaches that are considered easier and better studied, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems. A key difference between the two technologies is the fuel. While TAE's deuterium-fueled reactor has to get as hot as 1 billion degrees Celsius, Commonwealth Fusion’s tritium-deuterium fuel needs to reach only — I almost want to put “only” in quotes since we’re talking about a temperature nearly seven times hotter than the center of the sun — 100 million degrees. The more than two dozen private fusion companies racing to build the first power plant aren’t just competing against each other. China, as I have written in this newsletter recently, is outspending the rest of the world combined on fusion investments.
But the all-stock deal between TAE and Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, could capture more money from retail investors eager to get in on the fusion game. After all, the next-generation nuclear fission industry has a growing stable of startups whose stocks generate billions of dollars but whose businesses have no revenue. The merger shows “both the Trump administration’s commitment and investor appetite for clean, scalable fusion energy,” Greg Piefer, the chief executive of the rival fusion company SHINE Technologies, wrote in a LinkedIn post. Still, he said his startup, which Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote recently is already generating revenue selling medical isotopes, will be able “to scale faster than any other fusion company.” That’s a diplomatic way of analyzing a deal involving the president. When I called up Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF yesterday morning, he told me, “I’m just flabbergasted.”
2. House passes permitting reform bill with anti-wind measures
The House voted 221-196 Thursday to pass the SPEED Act, a bipartisan permitting reform bill to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act. Eleven Democrats supported the bill, and just one Republican voted no. But GOP lawmakers made last-minute changes to appease right-wing critics of offshore wind, causing some Democrats who planned to vote yes to defect, Politico reported. That provision will almost certainly make passage in the Senate a challenge. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported last week, top Senate Democrats vowed to oppose the legislation unless the bill barred executive branch agencies from yanking already-granted permits, a move designed to halt the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind. As our colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote yesterday, passing the House was one thing, “but now comes the hard part.”
Easing federal environmental assessments isn’t the only approach to speeding up energy deployment. As our other colleague Matthew Zeitlin explained yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing to make it easier to plug data centers directly into power plants.
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3. Energy Department faces probe over blue state cuts
The Department of Energy’s independent watchdog is opening an investigation into the agency’s decision to cancel $8 billion in funding for clean energy projects in California and other Democratic-leaning states. The bulk of the projects, including a $1.2 billion regional hydrogen hub, were located in California, the Los Angeles Times noted. The audit by the Energy Department’s Office of the Inspector General came in response to a plea from nearly 30 California lawmakers raising concern that the states were illegally targeted “for their perceived lack of support for President Trump.”
At the same time, a coalition of cities, consumer advocates, and green groups sued the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday over new Treasury Department rules “that unfairly and illegally discriminate against wind and solar projects.”
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4. Oklo backs a Swedish nuclear startup
A rendering of a future Blykalla power plant in a quintessential Nordic landscape.Blykalla
The Swedish nuclear startup Blykalla raised $50 million in a fresh round of funding to hasten its work on building small modular reactors. The most interesting name among the investors? The American nuclear startup Oklo. In a statement to NucNet, the companies said that by aligning two of the fastest-moving reactor developers in the world, the companies could shorten “critical paths to development, reducing schedule risks and unlocking supply chain efficiencies.” While Oklo’s as-yet-unbuilt microreactors would use liquid metal as a coolant, Blykalla’s design uses lead. But both models qualify as fourth-generation reactors.
5. GM considers former Tesla Autopilot chief as its next CEO
General Motors CEO Mary Barra may have identified her heir apparent, but first she plans to put him through a “tough test” in his new role as chief product officer. Sterling Anderson, the former head of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot division, first joined the Detroit giant in May, in what the electric vehicle site Electrek called “a surprising move that put a tech executive in charge of the legacy automaker’s entire vehicle development program.” Now a new report from Bloomberg stated that Barra sees Anderson as a frontrunner to replace her when she eventually steps down.
THE KICKER
Flying drones over whales to collect samples of exhaled breath from blowholes is considered a breakthrough in non-invasive health monitoring for marine giants in Arctic regions. Now, however, a study of wild humpback, sperm and fin whales in northern Norway has revealed for the first time a potentially deadly virus known as cetacean morbillivirus circulating above the Arctic Circle. The upside is that the new use of drones could support conservation by detecting the virus, which is connected to mass strandings, early before major death events. “Drone blow sampling is a game-changer,” Terry Dawson, a co-author of the study and a professor at King’s College London, said in a statement. “It allows us to monitor pathogens in live whales without stress or harm, providing critical insights into diseases in rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems.”
The House of Representatives has approved the SPEED Act, a bill that would bring sweeping changes to the nation’s environmental review process. It passed Thursday afternoon on a bipartisan vote of 221 to 196, with 11 Democrats in favor and just one Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, against.
Thursday’s vote followed a late change to the bill on Wednesday that would safeguard the Trump administration’s recent actions to pull already-approved permits from offshore wind farms and other renewable energy projects.
Prior to that tweak, the bill would have limited the Trump administration’s ability to alter or revoke a federal permitting decision after the fact. The new version, adopted to secure votes from Republican representatives in Maryland and New Jersey, carves out an exception for agency actions taken between January 20 and the day the law takes effect.
"Last-minute changes to the SPEED Act undercut the bill’s intent to provide certainty to American business,” Rich Powell, the CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association said in a press release after the bill passed. “We hope the Senate will now take this language and strengthen those protections for existing and new projects needed to maintain grid reliability and meet growing electricity demand.”
At a high level, the SPEED Act would hasten federal permitting by restricting the evidence that federal agencies consider during the environmental review process and limiting the amount of time a court can deliberate over challenges to federal decisions. It would also disallow courts from vacating permits or issuing injunctions against projects if it finds that a federal agency violated NEPA. The changes would apply to permits of all kinds, including for oil and gas drilling, solar and wind farms, power lines, and data centers.
Environmental groups were generally against the bill. “Far from helping build the clean energy projects of the future, the SPEED Act will only result in an abundance of contaminated air and water, dirty projects, and chronic illnesses with fewer opportunities to hold polluters accountable in court,” Stephen Sciama, senior legislative council for Earthjustice Action, said in a press release on Thursday.
But proponents, such as the conservative energy group Clearpath Action, argue the bill will enable American industry to “invest and build with confidence” by cutting unnecessary red tape, improving coordination across agencies, and setting clearer rules and timelines for judicial review.
In House floor testimony on Thursday morning, Republican Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the SPEED Act’s lead sponsor, said the bill had the backing of more than 375 industry groups and businesses, and bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. “The SPEED act will deliver the energy and infrastructure Americans need,” he said.
The bill lost at least one significant industry supporter after Wednesday’s changes, however. The American Clean Power Association, which had previously joined the American Petroleum Institute and others in a letter urging the House to pass the bill, withdrew its support, calling the new language a “poison pill” that “injects permit uncertainty, and creates a pathway for fully permitted projects to be canceled even after the Act’s passage.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association also denounced the bill’s passage.
Contrary to Westerman’s assertion, the bill’s fate in the Senate is far from certain. “Even if the House passes this bill today, it is going nowhere in the Senate,” Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California asserted on the floor on Thursday. “What a missed opportunity to tackle a serious issue that Democrats were very interested in working on in good faith.”
Some Senate Democrats came out in opposition of the bill even before the late-breaking amendments. Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico told my colleague Jael Holzman that the bill did not do enough to ensure the buildout of transmission and affordable clean energy, but that they “will continue working to pass comprehensive permitting reform that takes real steps to bring down electricity costs.”
Some see getting the SPEED Act through the House as merely a starting point for a more comprehensive and fair permitting deal. Democratic Representative Adam Gray of California told Politico’s Joshua Siegel Thursday that he was voting in favor of the bill despite the last minute changes due to his faith that the Senate will hammer out a version that provides developers of all energy stripes the certainty they need.
His Californian colleague Representative Scott Peters, on the other hand, voted against the bill, but committed to getting a deal done with the Senate. “We need to get permitting reform done in this Congress,” he said on the House floor Thursday.
A rendering of a future Blykalla power plant in a quintessential Nordic landscape.Blykalla