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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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As leaves begin to turn from green to autumn hues of amber, gold, and brown, New England is preparing for an expensive winter.
While most of the country heats their homes with natural gas or electricity, about 5 million households — overwhelmingly located in the Northeast — use oil. Like diesel and gasoline (both of which have set pricerecords recently) home heating oil is distilled from crude oil, which is currently trading at prices not seen since the early months of the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
Benchmark oil prices are over $100 for the first time since the spring as the Iran War grinds forward with no end in sight. Houthi attacks on Saudi oil tankers and infrastructure in and around the Red Sea and continued Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries have put added pressure on U.S. facilities to supply the world with gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel, raising prices domestically. Russia’s own fuel imports reached a record 172,000 metric tons in August, according to an analysis from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, mostly from South Korea and India, putting further strain on the global market (the country was once the largest exporter of refined products).
The effects have trickled downstream to the distillate market, as well. Diesel prices surged past $6 per gallon on Friday, while retail home heating oil prices in Maine, one of the Northeastern states most dependent on oil to heat homes, are around $5.39, their highest since April. Making matters worse, stocks of distillate fuel oil, which includes heating oil, are at their lowest level for this time of year since the Energy Information Administration started keeping records. The EIA released a new forecast this week projecting that “global production of distillate fuel will remain below last year’s levels in the coming months, contributing to low U.S. diesel inventories and high diesel prices.”
For Mainers and others across New England, that adds up to a hard winter to come.
“As the most heating oil reliant state in the country, Mainers are uniquely impacted by rising and volatile oil prices,” Acting Commissioner of the Maine Department of Energy Resources Celina Cunningham told me in an emailed statement. About half of the state’s residents “still rely on oil as their primary heating fuel,” she told me, even as outgoing Governor Janet Mills has encouraged heat pump adoption. “The cost of heating oil is already more than 60% higher than it was at this time last year,” Cunningham added, “putting added pressure on Maine households as we head into the winter heating season.”
Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told me that the total cost of heating a home exclusively on oil will jump from $1,740 to $2,297 this winter. “Families using heating oil will get hit twice — first from gasoline, and then heating oil,” he said.
The price of home heating oil has long been a hot button issue in New England politics, and this year’s slate of Congressional races is no exception. Matt Dunlap, the state auditor and Democratic nominee in Maine’s Trump-voting 2nd Congressional District, told reporters earlier this week while standing in front of a heating oil delivery truck that “right now, families across this district are sitting at their kitchen tables signing their heating oil contracts for the winter and staring at numbers they simply cannot afford.” In keeping with Trump’s recent admonition to pretend he’s on the ballot, Dunlap used the occasion to criticize the president’s foreign policy. The Iran War, Dunlap said, “is not an abstract foreign policy debate. That’s the reason your heating bill this winter could be hundreds of dollars higher than it was last year.”
Susan Collins, the Republican senator running for re-election in Maine, regularly highlights her role in bringing in funding from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program for Mainers, even as staff in charge of administering the program were laid off early in the Trump administration.
To the extent New Englanders can expect any relief, it likely won’t come from the supply dynamics of heating oil — the EIA has upped its price forecast for both this year and 2027. They may, however, simply need less. Thanks to what could be an historically strong El Niño, New England may be in for a warmer (albeit wetter) winter than usual.
This week’s conversation is a quick catch-up with our friends at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. I hopped on the phone with the center’s deputy director Romany Webb to chat about recent updates they published to anti-renewables opposition analysis. I wanted to dig into their research beyond the toplines — what should people care about in the coming election? How have data centers come up in their research? Or the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act?
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s start with the updates. Walk me through what’s new in your research.
So, we published two-year reports that detail renewable energy opposition across the United States; one is our report we’ve published since 2021 and it’s a new edition, and the other is an update of a report we published a few years ago on false claims about renewable energy where we highlight the misinformed used against projects.
This year’s local opposition report found local opposition continues to be widespread and really endemic. There’s been opposition to renewable energy development in every state across the country and we’re seeing it still have a real impact on whether projects get built. But there are small glimmers of hope. We identified 70 new state and local restrictions, which was a decline from previous years — that’s notable.
In select states where there have been a lot of these local restrictions, we’ve seen a drop off, like in Michigan after they enacted their state siting law. These are encouraging signs, and obviously it’s still early days, but it shows some of these state reforms are having a positive impact.
How is data center opposition coming up in your research?
Our reports do not track opposition to data center development. But we do certainly hear anecdotally that debates over data center development are spilling over into debates over renewable energy and battery storage. Often, local communities express concern that these new projects are just being built to power data centers — in some cases when there’s no connection at all, really. But I don’t have data on that link.
You said the law Michigan enacted might be working. Do you know if these laws limiting local opposition actually help with fighting renewable energy opponents, or are they engendering their own backlashes that undermine their effectiveness?
I think it’s too early to say the impacts they’ll have over the medium to long term. In the near term, many of the laws have been successful in accelerating the permitting of renewable energy projects or making it easier for them to be approved. Recent data out of New York shows that many of the projects that have gone through the new siting process are being approved — they’re still fairly long but they’re consistent which is good for development. In other places we’ve seen efforts to limit local government’s ability to adopt restrictions on renewable energy development, like Illinois and Michigan.
Those laws are relatively new, but the data we have shows that drop-off. It suggests the intended effect. But we need more time to know how effective they are and some of those laws have been getting quite a bit of pushback. There’s been a myriad of bills enacted in state legislatures across the country that would roll back those recent reforms or impose new restrictions on renewable development.
How much does the coming midterm election matter for the future of opposition to renewable energy?
I do think the next election will have important implications on whether we continue to see the ever-growing number of state level restrictions adopted or if we see a shift there.
Even if we see a shift in the composition of legislatures, I do think we’ll continue to see community opposition in many places to these projects. We shouldn’t ignore that developing a solar or wind project does have impacts on the local community and so developers really need to take steps to mitigate and manage those impacts.
If they don’t they’ll face the opposition, and even if they are they may face it because of misinformation around these projects.
My last question is, to what extent did the repeal of the IRA impact the ability for local opposition to kill projects in the crib?
I can’t say that definitively. I certainly don’t have the data that would support that sort of claim. And we don’t track that, specifically.
But often, groups that are opposed to renewable energy development will express concerns about the costs of projects or emphasize projects may not be viable without government subsidies. So the rollback of tax credits under the IRA plays into that argument. Of course when you look at the data, renewable energy projects are cheaper and the argument doesn’t hold muster.
But it’s an argument we regularly see pushed by opposition groups. That is how we have seen the IRA repeal affect this.
1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – A major utility sued the biggest newspaper in Arkansas over reporting on a data center energy deal. It’s a crucial case to follow.
The lawsuit Entergy filed last week against the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette centers on whether the newspaper was legally able to publish about an Entergy deal with Google around payments for a large solar farm to power a data center. It claims the information reported was a trade secret accidentally released by the state public services commission.
In a statement to a local ABC station, the utility claimed Google’s “electricity contract may be confidential to newspapers,” and that the publication also erroneously reported on the solar farm financing. Entergy is seeking a temporary restraining order blocking the publication from reporting any more information in its possession that would qualify as theirs or Google’s trade secrets, and claims they believe more information is in the publication’s possession that may be reported in the future, according to federal court filings.
So far, the utility has been unable to win the stoppage and U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky rejected their request on Wednesday. The case is proceeding and I will be checking in regularly for you on this one.
Why is this case so important? This is easily the most aggressive communications response to public reporting on a previously-unknown deal related to a data center. At a time when non-disclosure agreements are a profound liability for the sector, I am surprised to see a utility go as far as a federal court challenge.
2. Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania – Speaking of hardcore legal strategies, have you ever heard of a data center developer asking every local official to recuse themselves?
This week, town leaders in the town of Archbald rejected a legal request from a developer for quite literally every deciding voice to withdraw from considering their project. Instead, the developer Cornell Realty Management asked for an independent hearing examiner to oversee their project permitting application because the officials’ previous statements against development apparently could qualify as improper bias. They didn’t bite. Now the town has roughly 45 days to decide on the project.
The overcrowded data center destination of Archbald is ground zero for the Keystone State data center backlash and has been highlighted numerous times in national media as a flashpoint in AI hyperscale development. Gov. Josh Shapiro visited the town in May as part of trotting out his then-voluntary standards for the sector. Since May, Shapiro’s sought to make those rules essentially a requirement for state permits, at least for now.
I drove through Archbald a few weeks ago. The collection of data centers around you while winding its northern Pennsylvania foothills are impossible to ignore, as well as the sprawling sections of deforestation along a highway that crosses underneath power line after power line. I can understand why some residents there might be irritated by even more of this coming to town.
3. Loudon County, Virginia – Data Center Alley is giving us our first real glimpse of what data center legislating could look like if Democrats control at least one chamber of Congress.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam represents all of Loudon County, making him probably the most important elected member of Congress on the data center front. On Thursday, he introduced a slate of four bills targeting public concerns about data centers, including two separate bills requiring the Energy Department and National Institutes of Standards and Technology to craft best practices for the sector, respectively. One of the bills would make states create unique electricity price rules for data centers compelling them to pay more, known as “large load tariffs,” and the remaining proposal would require a national strategy related to defense issues and data centers.
Subramanyam is a first-term congressman with little experience in the federal legislature to bolster any claims he’ll get these bills into law. But this is a huge issue for him and a lot of this seems to have legs with key Democrats. The bill going after DOE is cosponsored by Reps. Mike Levin, Mike Quigley, and Veronica Escobar, and his proposal to create a large-load tariff dovetails with a similar idea floated by Sen. Martin Heinrich. It all feels like kismet, and would represent a soft touch compared to any kind of land use restriction.
I don’t think Democrats will pass any major legislation should they retake the chamber. But time and time again, when local residents aggrieved at large-scale development can’t get what they want from county or state leaders, they turn to their members of Congress to act. It’s happened with Republicans and renewables, and now it’s happening with Democrats and data centers.
4. Lane County, Oregon – The second largest city in Oregon is now turning down data centers, just as the governor starts saying no to anything on state land.
This week we learned the city of Eugene rejected a request for a former semiconductor plant to be for a data center, claiming its zoning code for IT projects doesn’t include them at all. The old former plant to me is representative of the industrial techlash; it used to be a major employer locally until it was closed around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, and now it won’t be used for where investment in heavy industry is going today.
Eugene’s denial demonstrates just how toxic data centers have become in Oregon when they once were courted as a form of economic development. Lane County itself scores above a 70 risk for both renewables and data centers in the Heatmap Pro database, which is primarily a reflection of how much protected acreage and large landowners are located in the large, bucolic, and forested county in western Oregon.
On Tuesday, around the same time Eugene’s rejection was made public, Gov. Tina Kotek north of Lane County announced a pause on all state right-of-way and land use permit issuances for data centers. Kotek said the move focused on state land, which is technically true, and it’s a far cry from a statewide moratorium, which the governor claims state law doesn’t allow her to create on her own. However, she’s calling it a moratorium in the press.
