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.
Current conditions: Geomagnetic activity ramped up again last night, bringing potential glimpses of the Aurora Borealis as far south as the Gulf Coast states • Heavy rain and mountain snow is disrupting flights across the Southwestern United States • Record November heat across Spain brought temperatures as high as 84 degrees Fahrenheit.
THE TOP FIVE
1. The longest-ever government shutdown officially ends
President Donald Trump signed legislation to fund the government and reopen operations late Wednesday, setting the stage for federal workers to return as soon as Thursday morning. “That is what has happened in the past — if it is signed the night before, no matter how late, you head back to work the next day,” Nicole Cantello, the head of a union that represents Environmental Protect Agency employees in the agency’s Chicago regional office, told E&E News, noting that it’s told its members to prepare to go back to the office today.
2. Gavin Newsom accuses Trump’s climate policies of scoring an economic ‘own goal’
Speaking at the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, on Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Trump of scoring an economic “own goal” by abandoning federal climate policies and ceding dominance over clean energy to China. The Democrat, widely expected to run for his party’s presidential nod in 2028, is the highest-profile American politician to appear at the first conference in years where the sitting U.S. administration declined to send a high-level delegation. Reversing the Biden administration’s carbon-cutting policies amounted to “the own goal of the president of the United States who simply doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is that the Trump administration is nowhere at COP30,” Newsom told the audience at the Amazonian confab, according to the Financial Times. “The United States of America better wake up at that. It’s not about electric power. It’s about economic power.”
As I wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter, China is on a climate winning streak. New analysis published this week in Carbon Brief found that the country’s emissions stayed flat in the last quarter, extending a trend of flat or falling carbon pollution since March 2024. The biggest driver of power plant development in the U.S., meanwhile, appears to be on increasingly shaky footing. A new report from the Center for Public Enterprise found that data center companies are increasingly taking on debt and creating interlocking financing deals to pay for the rapid buildout of server farms.
3. Plug Power pauses national hydrogen factory buildout
Plug Power put plans to build as many as six new hydrogen production plants across the U.S. on hold as the Trump administration pares back its plans to support the zero-carbon fuel. The company, which has never turned a profit, said it has suspended its rollout of factories in Texas, New York, and other states, and, according to the Albany Times-Union, “will instead buy hydrogen from an existing supplier.” Plug Power had received funding not just from the Department of Energy, but also from the New York Power Authority, which awarded a large allocation of low-cost hydropower to support a $290 million green hydrogen facility in Genesee County, just east of Buffalo.
It’s part of a broader reshuffling of decarbonization priorities in the Empire State. New York agreed on Wednesday to suspend implementation of new statewide rules that would have banned all new low-rise buildings from establishing hookups to the gas system, effectively mandating the use of electric heating and cooking appliances. The move comes just weeks after the state lost its biggest battery project on Staten Island amid growing pushback from residents, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
4. Waymo starts offering freeway rides in California and Arizona
Way more capable. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
While New York City still has the West Coast handily beaten on public transit, the self-driving robotaxi company Waymo just rolled out rides on freeways for the first time. The Google-spinout startup, which uses all electric vehicles, announced plans on Wednesday to start offering rides on freeways in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. “We’re offering freeway access to a growing number of public riders and will introduce the service to more over time, including as we expand freeway capabilities to Austin, Atlanta, and beyond — always guided by our commitment to safety and service excellence,” the company said in a blog post. “Freeway trips make Waymo even more convenient and efficient, whether you’re headed to Sky Harbor International Airport, cruising from Downtown LA to Culver City, or commuting in our newly expanded Bay Area service.”"
5. Constellation embraces demand response
Among the warring tribes of the energy transition, you often get so-called nuclear bros on one side calling for as much abundant clean power as possible, and renewables hardliners on the other demanding more judicious use of existing clean power by cutting back on wasted energy. The latest plan from the nation’s largest nuclear plant operator tries to have it both ways. In his utility giant’s latest earnings call, Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez said the company is “seeing a lot of great capability to use backup generation and flex compute,” Utility Dive reported.
It’s a sign of the growing trend toward demand response, wherein large power uses such as data centers scale back when the grid is under particular stress, such as on a hot day when everyone is using air conditioning. “I don’t think we’re going to get to a point where we could flex on and off the full output of data centers,” Dominguez warned. But he said the company is exploring the potential for artificial intelligence software to “attract some of our customers to actually providing the relief or the slack on the system during the key hours.” Still, the idea is attracting attention. Regulators at the state and federal level are now considering what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin called “one weird trick for getting more data centers on the grid.”
THE KICKER
The first front of climate action, started in the 1900s, was conservation, figuring out how to use energy more efficiently. The second front was about cleaning up the toxic mess left behind by mid-20th century industry. The third front, now emerging, is about finding ways to support construction of more energy infrastructure in recognition of the fact that there’s no such thing as national prosperity in a low-energy economy. That’s the take from Aliya Haq, the president of the nonprofit Clean Energy Project, who called for a new approach to climate advocacy in a new Heatmap op-ed.
Roughly 50,000 people are in Brazil this week for COP30, the annual United Nations climate summit. If history is any guide, they will return home feeling disappointed. After 30 years of negotiations, we have yet to see these summits deliver the kind of global economic transformation we need. Instead, they’ve devolved into rituals of hand-wringing and half measures.
The United States has shown considerable inertia and episodic hostility through each decade of climate talks. The core problem isn’t politics. It’s perspective. America has been treating climate as a moral challenge when the real stakes are economic prosperity.
I’ve spent my career advancing the moral case from inside the environmental movement. Over the decades we succeeded at rallying the faithful, but we failed to deliver change at the scale and speed required. We passed regulations only to watch them be repealed. We pledged to cut emissions and missed the mark, again and again.
People think of climate change as a crisis to contain when it’s really a competition to win. We need to build what’s next, not stop what’s bad. And what’s at stake isn’t just emissions; it’s whether America leads or lags in the next era of global economic growth.
That calls for a new approach to climate action — a third front.
In the early 1900s, the first front focused on conservation — protecting forests, nature, and wildlife. The second front, in the 1960s and 70s, tackled pollution — cleaning up our air and water, regulating toxins, and safeguarding public health. Both were about “stopping” harm. They worked because they aimed at industries where slowing down made sense.
But energy doesn’t fit that mold. International pledges and national regulations to “stop” carbon emissions are destined to fail without affordable and accessible fossil-fuel replacements. Why? Because low-cost energy makes people’s lives better. Longer life expectancies, better health care, lower infant mortality, and higher literacy follow in its wake. Energy is foundational for prosperity, powering nearly every part of our modern lives.
No high-income country has low energy consumption. Prosperity depends on abundant energy. Global energy demand will keep rising, as poor countries install more refrigerators and air conditioning, and rich countries build more data centers and advanced manufacturing. Today, fossil fuels provide 80% of primary energy because they are cheap and easy to move around. That’s why the tools of “stopping harm” that we used to protect rivers and forests will not win the race. Innovation, not limits, leads to progress.
The third front is not about blocking fossil fuels; it’s about beating them. Stopping fossil fuels doesn’t fix the electric grid or reinvent steelmaking. By contrast, lowering the cost of clean technologies will spur economic growth, create jobs in rural counties, and lower electricity bills for working families.
Yet clean energy projects in the U.S. are routinely delayed by red tape, outdated rules, and policy whiplash. A transmission line often takes more than a decade to plan, permit, and construct. Meanwhile, China has added more than 8,000 miles of ultra‑high‑voltage transmission in just four years, compared with fewer than 400 miles here at home. American entrepreneurs are ready to build but our systems and rules haven’t caught up.
And the urgency to fix the problem is mounting. Electricity prices and energy demand are surging, while terawatts of clean energy projects pile up in the interconnection queue. We are struggling to build a 21st century economy on 20th century infrastructure.
The third front of climate action starts with building faster and smarter. That responsibility lies with policymakers at every level. In the U.S., Congress and federal agencies must treat energy infrastructure as economic competitiveness, not just environmental policy. State and local regulators must expedite permitting. Regional grid operators must speed up interconnection and integration of new technologies.
But government’s role is to clear the path, not dictate the outcome. The private sector — entrepreneurs pioneering technologies from long-duration storage to advanced geothermal to next-generation nuclear — is ready to build. What they need is for policymakers to remove the obstacles. We can use public policy not to command markets, but rather to unlock them, reward innovation, and create certainty that encourages investment.
The same logic applies globally. The multilateral climate system has focused on negotiating emission limits, but we need a renewed effort toward lowering the cost of clean energy so it can outcompete fossil fuels in every market, from the richest economies to the poorest. Whether through the UN, the G-20, or the Clean Energy Ministerial, the international community must play a role in that shift — not through collating new pledges, but by taking action on cost reduction, technology deployment, and removing barriers to scale. Through economic cooperation and competition, both, domestic policies around the world need to align toward making clean energy win on economics, backed by private capital and innovation.
It’s time to measure progress not only by tons of carbon avoided, but also by how much new energy capacity we add, how quickly clean projects come online, and how much private capital moves into clean industries.
There is a cure for the fatigue induced from 30 years of climate summits and setbacks. It’s a new playbook built on economic growth and shared prosperity. The goal is not only to reduce emissions. We must build a system where clean energy is so affordable, abundant, and reliable that it becomes the obvious choice. Not because people are told to use it, but because it is better.
Current conditions: From Cleveland to Syracuse, cities on the Great Lakes are bracing for heavy snowfall • Rainfall in Northern California could top 6 inches today • Thousands evacuated in the last few hours in Taiwan as Typhoon Fung-wong makes landfall.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Deal to end government shutdown kills off USDA climate hubs
The bill that would fund the government through the end of the year and end the nation’s longest federal shutdown eliminates support for the Department of Agriculture’s climate hubs. The proposed compromise to reopen the government would slash funding for USDA’s 10 climate hubs, which E&E News described as producing “regional research and data on extreme weather, natural disasters and droughts to help farmers make informed decisions.”
2. Trump’s pro-gas policies are upending global fossil fuel forecasts
Gassing up the planet. Montinique Monroe/Getty Images
Call it American exceptionalism. The effects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and America’s world-leading artificial intelligence development “have meaningfully altered” the International Energy Agency’s forecasts of global fossil fuel usage and emissions, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote this morning. The trajectory of global temperature rise may be, as I have written in this newsletter, so far largely unaffected by the new American administration’s policies. But multiple scenarios outlined in the Paris-based IEA’s 2025 World Energy Outlook predict “gas demand continues growing into the 2030s, due mainly to changes in U.S. policies and lower gas prices.”
That stands in contrast to China, a comparison that was inevitable this week as the world gathers for the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil — the first that Washington is all but ignoring as the Trump administration moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. As I wrote here yesterday, China's emissions remained flat in the last quarter, extending a streak that began in March 2024.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
3. A giant wind project in New Jersey is getting killed
Heatmap’s Jael Holzman had a big scoop last night: Yet another offshore wind project on the East Coast is kaput. The lawyers representing the Leading Light Wind offshore project filed a letter on November 7 to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities informing the regulator it “no longer sees any way to complete construction and wants to pull the plug,” Jael wrote. “The Board is well aware that the offshore wind industry has experienced economic and regulatory conditions that have made the development of new offshore wind projects extremely difficult,” counsel Colleen Foley wrote in the letter, a copy of which Jael got her hands on. The project was meant to be built 35 miles off New Jersey’s coast, and was expected to provide about 2.4 gigawatts of electricity to the power-starved state.
It’s the latest casualty of Trump’s “total war on wind,” and comes as other projects in Maryland and New England are fighting to retain permits amid the administration’s multi-agency onslaught.
4. Colorado utility pushes to keep a coal plant open for longer
Xcel Energy proposed extending the life of its Comanche 2 coal-fired power plant for 12 months past its shutdown date in December. The utility giant, backed by state officials and consumer advocates, told the Colorado Public Utilities Commission on Monday that maintaining power production from the 50-year-old unit was important as the power plant scrambled to maintain enough power generation following the breakdown of the coal plant's third unit. The 335-megawatt Comanche 2 generator in Pueblo is expected to get approval to keep running. “We need it for resource adequacy and reliability, underlining that need for reliability and resource adequacy are central issues,” Robert Kenney, CEO of Xcel Energy’s Colorado subsidiary, told The Colorado Sun. The move comes as Trump’s Department of Energy is ordering coal plants in states such as Michigan to keep operating months past closure deadlines at the cost of millions of dollars per month to ratepayers, as I have previously written.
Pennsylvania, meanwhile, may be preparing to withdraw from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the cap-and-trade market in which much of the Northeast’s biggest states partake. A state budget deal described bySpotlight PA reporter Stephen Caruso on X would remove the commonwealth from the market.
5. Germany and Spain pledge $100 million to a global adaptation fund
Germany and Spain vowed to give $100 million to the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, a $13 billion multilateral financing pool to help poor countries deal with the effects of climate change. The funding, announced Monday at an event at the U.N.’s Cop30 summit in Brazil, is “an opportunity too large to ignore,” Tariye Gbadegesin, chief executive officer of Climate Investment Funds, said in a statement. While mitigation work has long held priority in international lending, adaptation work to give some relief to the countries that contributed the least to climate change but pay the highest tolls from extreme weather has often received scant support. In his controversial memo calling for a sober, new direction for global funding, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates called on countries to take adaptation more seriously. For more on what he said, read the rundown Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote.
THE KICKER
Right in time for the region’s most iconic season, when even celebrants in farflung parts of this country think of the old Puritan lands during Halloween and Thanksgiving, I bring to you what might be the most New England story ever. A blade broke off a wind turbine near Plymouth, Massachusetts, last week and landed in — get ready for it — a cranberry bog. The roughly 90-foot blade left behind debris, but “no one was hurt, and the turbine automatically shut itself down as designed,” the local fire chief said.
Way more capable. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Gassing up the planet. Montinique Monroe/Getty Images