Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force
reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to
that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile
here
.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey,
you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and
take advantage of our introductory offer.
Informative, engaging analysis and insights about climate issues
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will
renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of
your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may
apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
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.
Here in Los Angeles, the hot new thing in parenting is Waymo. One recent article argued that driverless electric vehicles have become the go-to solution for overscheduled parents who can’t be everywhere at once. No time to drive the kid to school dropoff or to practice? Hire a rideshare, preferably one without a potentially problematic human driver.
Perhaps it’s fitting that younger Americans, especially, are encountering electric cars in this way. Over the past few years, plenty of headlines have declared that teens and young adults have fallen out of love with the automobile; they’re not getting their driver’s licenses until later, if at all, and supposedly aren’t particularly keen on car ownership compared to their parents and grandparents. Getting around in a country built for the automobile leaves them more reliant on the rideshare industry — which, it so happens, is a place where the technological trends of electric and autonomous vehicles are rapidly converging.
This isn’t the way most people, myself included, talk about the EV revolution. That discourse typically runs through the familiar lens of our personal vehicles — which, it should be noted, Americans still lease or buy in the millions. In that light, EVs are struggling. Since buyers raced to scoop up electric cars in September before the federal tax credit lapsed, sales have slowed. Automakers have canceled or delayed numerous models and pivoted back to combustion engines or hybrids in response to the hostile Trump-era environment for selling EVs. While the world has carried on with electrification, America has backslid.
While all this was happening, however, the rideshare industry was accelerating in the opposite direction. Waymo’s fleet of autonomous vehicles is all-electric, currently made up of Jaguar I-Pace SUVs. Uber just invested more than $1 billion in Rivian as part of a plan to add thousands of the brand’s new R2 EVs to its fleet of electric robotaxis. Tesla’s moves are particularly telling. Elon Musk is still selling plenty of normal, human-driven Model Y and Model 3 EVs to make some money for the moment, but the company’s future prospects are all-in on the Cybercab, a two-seater robotaxi that would never be driven by a person. Who’d buy such a thing? Rideshare companies — or, perhaps, people see the Cybercab as a passive income machine that shuttles their neighbors around town whenever they’re not riding in it.
Human-driven rideshare fleets are quickly electrifying, too. Uber now allows riders to request an EV explicitly, an option that has been growing in popularity, especially as rising gas prices make electric rides more appealing. The company has been offering thousands of dollars of incentives to drivers who want to buy an EV, a program that expanded nationwide this month. EV-maker Fisker went bankrupt and folded, but its orphaned Ocean vehicles are roaming New York City as rideshare cars. Sara Rafalson of the charging company EVgo recently told me that rideshare already accounts for a quarter of the energy it distributes.
Yes, gasoline carries certain advantages for a taxi service — a gas-burning cab can drive all night with just momentary refueling stops, for example, whereas an EV must go out of commission during its occasional charging stops. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the rideshare industry is going electric.
That isn’t just because EVs have a futuristic vibe. There are technological reasons, too. Tesla and Rivian have designed their vehicles to be effectively smartphones on wheels, which makes them ideally suited for robotaxis. EVs have plenty of battery power on hand to meet all the computational demands of self-driving. Plus, electric power is particularly efficient for stop-and-go urban driving.
On the EV side, the business case for electric robotaxis is particularly compelling. One reason electric cars have struggled with everyday Americans is that it’s more difficult for an individual to stomach the higher upfront cost of an EV to enjoy its longer-term rewards. That’s less true for a business, whose accountants know EVs mean less long-term maintenance.
In the case of the rideshare economy, EVs are becoming the clear choice even though they’re owned by individual drivers. While the EV purchasing tax credit is gone for individuals, drivers can get financial help from a company like Uber to purchase an EV, which allows them to insulate themselves from the volatility of gas prices and reduce their regular maintenance schedule. They can also charge strategically around their taxi trips; robotaxi fleets often concentrate their recharging to the overnight hours when electricity is cheapest.
There is plenty of evidence that the “Gen Z doesn’t want to own cars” narrative is as reductive and oversimplified as you’d think. Younger generations are interested in cars — and in electric cars, in particular — but they’re often put off by the soaring costs of owning and maintaining a vehicle. As EV prices continue to fall, you can expect EV adoption to accelerate among Gen Z and millennial drivers.
In the meantime, those folks don’t have to buy an EV to join the EV age. It’s getting more and more likely that the car that drives you to the airport will be an EV — and more likely that riders will opt for electric if given the choice.
Everyone’s mad about high oil prices, but are they doing anything about it? With around 11 million barrels per day (about a tenth of global production) shut in, and thus missing from the global oil market, someone has to be using less of it. Maybe it’s petrochemical plants that run on tight margins slowing down. Maybe it’s European airlines cancelling flights.
At least so far, it’s probably not American drivers.
“In the U.S. we’re seeing an indifference, in terms of what we can see from consumption numbers,” David Doherty, head of natural resources research at BloombergNEF, told me on the sidelines of the research group’s annual summit last week. The Energy Information Administration’s proxy for gasoline consumption, “product supplied of finished motor gasoline,” shows no dramatic change following the beginning of the war or subsequent spike in oil prices.
Gas prices in the United States sit at $4.11 per gallon according to AAA, compared to $3.15 a year ago. But even in the context of the almost $5 per gallon in 2022 and the $4.11-ish gas hit in the summer of 2008, the impact on actual households is likely more mild.
“$4 now is very different to $4 five years ago. And it's definitely different to $4 in 2008, which is when the last price spikes came through,” Doherty said. “$4 doesn't get you a coffee now. $4 a decade ago got you coffee plus oat milk.”
For one, a dollar is hardly a dollar anymore. There’s been higher than typical inflation since 2022, and a substantial rise in overall prices since 2008. This means that a dollar of gasoline (or even $4) is taking up a smaller portion of American consumer spending than it has in the past.
Looking back even further, the American auto fleet has gotten more efficient, meaning that drivers are getting more miles per gallon — and thus miles per dollar — than they were in the past. And that’s not even taking into account the rise of electric vehicles, which allow drivers to opt out of gasoline price volatility altogether.
Ironically, a big chunk of the credit comes from the now essentially scrapped Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards — themselves a response to the 1973 oil shock and designed to ease the American auto fleet’s dependency on fuels with volatile prices set by the global market by ratcheting up fuel economy over time. Then in 2007, President George W. Bush signed into law the first major tightening of CAFE standards in nearly 30 years.
“CAFE standards — which have just been neutered — ultimately have helped,” Doherty told me, referring to the Trump administration’s successful efforts to undo further fuel economy progress under the Obama and Biden administrations.
Overall, the U.S. economy has also gotten less “oil intensive” — we simply use less oil per dollar of economic activity than we used to. Since 1970, oil consumption has gone up by about 20%, while the size of the economy as measured in GDP has more than quadrupled.
When it comes to how the changing price of oil, and thereby gasoline, affects drivers, it’s a little trickier. I decided to calculate the “miles per dollar” on an annual basis, and then conservatively estimated how fleet efficiency would have increased by now.
To do this, I looked at the average miles per gallon of the U.S. car fleet and the “all grades” gasoline price for those same years. (“All grades” a little higher than the typical “regular” gas series, but the data goes back further.) The MPG data only goes back to 2024, so I conservatively projected it out to this year. While U.S. drivers are getting less out of their dollar than they did in 2024, they’re also going farther than they did in 2022 and 2008, the last time gas prices spiked dramatically.
I also wanted to get an idea of how much household spending is on gasoline. There’s no perfect way to do this with up-to-date data, but I was able to look at the relative importance of transportation fuel in the Consumer Price Index, which tells you the portion of spending on gasoline among the goods and services tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As expected, the relative importance rose dramatically in the 1970s and early 1980s, and hit a new high in 2007; in 2025, it fell close to its all time lows at just under 3%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also looks at annual household spending on gasoline. The latest data from 2024 agreed that it had been falling, from $2,805 in 2022, to $2,449 in 2023, and then $2,411 in 2024, but the 2025 data isn’t available yet.
Looking at more frequently updated data, the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee estimated that spending in February on “gasoline and other energy goods” was just over 1.9% of all personal consumption, a more than 0.2 percentage point decline from a year ago. This was, of course, before gasoline prices soared in March and into April.
“If you were to put [gasoline] beside the cost of your rent, for example, it's becoming a much smaller slice of your outlays,” Doherty said. This is the now-abandoned fuel efficiency standards actually working, Doherty said. “It's a different share of your budget. It's a more efficient car, and that’s through design.”
This also helps explain why in the United States, we’re not seeing the “demand destruction” that should accompany a contraction in oil supply, where consumers cut back consumption in response to high prices.
But with lines of empty tankers queuing up at the United States’ Gulf Coast petroleum export complex, looking to bring American crude to markets that can’t get their hands on oil from the Persian Gulf, prices may still have a way to go. Drivers in the United States are now in a barrel-for-barrel competition with the rest of the world.
Current conditions: Nearly two dozen states from Texas to Minnesota are bracing for days of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, and winds up to 70 miles per hour • Japan is deploying 1,400 firefighters to battle a wildfire in Iwate prefecture that has forced at least 3,000 people to evacuate • While it’s nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny today in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exactly 40 years ago yesterday the weather worsened the world’s worst nuclear accident by blowing radiation from the melted-down reactor.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Trump ousts the board members from National Science Foundation
The Trump administration has dismissed every member of the independent board that oversees the National Science Foundation. In what The New York Times described as a “terse email” sent Friday afternoon, members of the 25-member National Science Board were told their position was “terminated, effective immediately.” Willie E. May, a terminated board member and a vice president at Morgan State University, told the newspaper: “I am deeply disappointed, though I cannot say I am entirely surprised. I have watched the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government with growing alarm, and the National Science Board is simply the latest casualty.” The move to seize tighter control over funding for scientific research comes two months after the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the legal finding that underpins all federal climate regulations and days after the Department of Health and Human Services nixed publication of a study about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
Meanwhile, a top Republican in Congress has confirmed the limits of President Donald Trump’s bid to cap pay at the Tennessee Valley Authority. The White House’s push to limit compensation at the nation’s largest public power utility to $500,000 only applies to the chief executive, Representative Chuck Fleischmann, Republican from Tennessee, told The Knoxville News Sentinel. The White House sought to fire TVA CEO Don Moul last year, but ultimately backed down.
2. China calls for stricter controls of fossil fuel consumption
An oil price sign in Hubei province,. Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Beijing has laid out plans for tighter controls over fossil fuel use and greater oversight of heavy emitters in what experts told Carbon Brief was “a signal of China’s ongoing commitment to climate action and bridging policy” between the government’s national and sectoral five-year plans. The policy document, totaling nearly 2,800 words when translated into English, is what’s known as a “guiding opinion,” and “is not strictly binding, it bears the stamp of the two highest bodies in China’s political system, conveying a strong sense of authority,” wrote Anika Patel, the China editor at Carbon Brief, noting that “this is the first high-level document to explicitly link decarbonisation efforts with energy security and industrial development.” As Qi Qin, a China analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham last month: “I don’t think China is creating these technologies as a niche climate experiment anymore. They’re being folded into a broader industrial strategy. I think that the more important question is which of them are moving into real deployment now, and which are still at the stage of strategic signaling.”
At roughly the same time, the Chinese government has published an atlas of deep-sea mineral deposits as the People’s Republic looks to ramp up its ambitions to harvest critical metals from the ocean floor.
3. Maine’s governor vetoes bill to temporarily ban data centers
At the start of this month, I told you Maine was poised to become the first state to ban construction of data centers, at least temporarily. Not anymore. On Friday, Governor Janet Mills vetoed the bill, the Portland Press-Herald reported. In her message to the legislature, the Democrat said that, while a moratorium “is appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” the “final version of this bil fails to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay that enjoys strong local support from its host community and region.” The 2023 closure of Androscoggin Mill, a pulp and paper plant, dealt what she called “a devastating blow” to the town, located roughly an hour and 20 minutes north of Portland, and the server farm would help “promote reinvestment and job creation at the former mill,” she said. Mills is locked in a heated race with left-wing populist Graham Platner for the Democratic nomination to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins this November.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
4. First-of-a-kind green fertilizer project wins final approval
The British-listed green fertilizer company Atome is set to build a first-of-a-kind project in Paraguay, taking advantage of low-cost hydropower to produce ammonia using green hydrogen instead of natural gas. The firm’s final investment decision on the $665 million plant in Villeta, south of the capital of Asunción, comes as the Iran War disrupts fertilizer markets and drives up costs. “We’ve proven that you can actually close and finance an industrial-scale, green fertilizer facility,” chief executive Olivier Mussat told the Financial Times. “It’s never been done before.”
5. The U.S. just renewed a nuclear plant’s license in record time
Duke Energy’s Robinson nuclear power plant in South Carolina just won the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval to operate for 80 years as part of the fastest license renewal review in the agency’s history. The NRC cleared Unit 2 of the Robinson Steam Electric Plant — a single-unit pressurized water reactor — to operate for another 20 years. This, according to World Nuclear News, is the unit’s “second, or subsequent, license renewal: it received a 20-year renewal of its original 40-year license in 2004.” The NRC formally accepted the license renewal application for docketing on April 28, 2025, then completed the review within a 12-month timeframe. That’s six fewer months than the previous schedule, in accordance with an executive order Trump issued last year. “This milestone proves we can deliver results quickly without compromising safety,” NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said in a statement. “By focusing on essential factors for sustained nuclear power plant safety and applying lessons learned from past renewals, our team was able to work efficiently while maintaining their commitment to enabling timely safety decisions.”
THE KICKER
TotalEnergies may be exiting offshore wind in the U.S. for the price of $1 billion from the Trump administration. But over in Kazakhstan, the French energy giant is expanding its wind footprint. While the landlocked Central Asian country doesn’t have much in the way of shores off of which to build turbines, it does have vast, windy steppelands. TotalEnergies plans to invest in a gigawatt of wind power and 600 megawatt-hours of battery storage, Renewables Now reported.
An oil price sign in Hubei province,. Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images