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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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It isn’t exactly a new thought, but I’ve been struck recently by how many trends in America’s economic and environmental data are fundamentally about the data center boom and the return of electricity demand:
First, the Energy Information Administration reported this week that U.S. emissions grew by more than 2% last year, driven by surging electricity demand and an increase in coal-fired generation. What caused that higher power demand? New factories and data centers — as well as record summertime cooling demand.
Second, many of the new factories driving that higher power demand are themselves producing goods that are … let’s say … data center-adjacent. There are the enormous new semiconductor fabs, of course. But Ford and General Motors have also set up new production lines (or repurposed old ones) to manufacture grid-scale batteries to meet power demand.
Third, take a look at the recent U.S. spending on private non-residential construction — in other words, everything American companies are building that is not houses, condos, or apartments.
The construction industry’s spent almost $60 billion on data centers over the past year, which is more than it spent on all other office buildings combined (and more than it spent building warehouses, too). Just a handful of categories — data centers, power plants, electricity infrastructure, and certain kinds of electronics manufacturing — now make up a third of all U.S. private non-residential construction investment. They’ve never made up such a large share of construction spending since data collection began in 2014.
As The New York Times recently noted, the American economy is unusually dependent on the American stock market right now — and the stock market is unusually dependent on artificial intelligence. This week, investors started to balk at the enormous spending hyperscalers are planning to keep building out the AI boom; Alphabet’s shares dropped 8% this week after it boosted its planned 2026 capital expenditure and signaled 2027 will be even bigger. If the data center boom started to slow down in earnest, then more than just that budget will change.
Speaking of which, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote earlier this week about how many businesses are struggling to even estimate their carbon emissions from artificial intelligence. The carbon accounting startup Watershed recently unveiled a new formula to help companies get a sense of their AI-related emissions.
But even that formula is still limited by the amount of data hyperscalers publish — and they don’t publish that much. Google, for instance, is the only AI company that has (laudably) provided estimates of its emissions on a per-prompt basis. Yet no company has published its per-token emissions, or how emissions sync up with particular models or regions.
So Emily asked Google: Why aren’t you — or any other model provider — disclosing this kind of data yet?
The tech company didn’t get back to us until after we’d published Emily’s story. But its response was interesting enough that I wanted to quote some of it here.
The problem is “industry consensus,” Cooper Elsworth, a Google spokesperson, told us. “There is currently very little consensus on how to comprehensively and fairly measure the serving environmental impact of generative AI (such as text generation),” he wrote. “Without standardized, ‘apples-to-apples’ frameworks, it is difficult to compare different providers accurately.”
That’s partly because energy use — and emissions data — can vary from site to site and depend on “custom-built hardware, software compilers, and advanced inference techniques.” And he claimed Google doesn’t always have the measurement hardware in place to provide such specific estimates: “Providing precise, repeatable data requires highly advanced measurement infrastructure,” he said. “For example, software-based energy monitoring tools often suffer from sampling biases. For our study, we had to step away from top-down averages and directly measure actual energy at the physical power supply unit (PSU) level across our deployed fleet. Not all providers have the telemetry or data sets required to benchmark their operations at this level of granularity.”
Read Emily’s story to understand the other reasons why estimating — or even “guesstimating” — AI-related carbon emissions is so challenging.
This week’s conversation is with Emma Uridge, analyst with the Kansas Health Institute. Uridge spent copious hours analyzing state and local laws on data center development to best understand how policymakers are responding to the potential environmental public health impacts of large AI infrastructure, including power and water. The report, which came out this week, also goes in depth into those health impacts. I reached out to her to discuss what she sees as must-watch territory for our readers on this emerging policy arena.
Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
What is actually being done on policy when it comes to data centers — beyond moratoria of course?
So first I’d like to just talk about the point of moratoria. It’s helpful to talk about how these policies emerge in the first place. One area where moratoria are helpful is when a data center is proposed but the county has no approach for how they’d like to potentially regulate them. That’s temporary, most of the time. It lets local governments conduct research on the various impacts and also negotiate community benefits, ones that can mitigate any potential negative impacts — like Lancaster Pennsylvania, which instituted a community benefit agreement that maximized the potential benefits of development while mitigating what large data centers can do. That agreement looked at capping municipal water use at 20,000 gallons per day and requiring 100% clean energy. It had financial penalties for non-compliance. The company also committed $20 million to their local economic development and clean energy fund. There are ways to negotiate with developers.
We also see amendments to existing zoning. Data center proposals are increasingly popping up in rural areas, many of which are unzoned, so there’s no way a county can negotiate unless there’s a moratorium in place.
Other policy solutions include different performance standards or requiring on-site renewable energy, like what Jefferson County, Missouri, looked at. Also setback requirements, mandatory noise buffers, ending by-right zoning.
Where are local governments getting ideas for regulating data centers?
A lot of the technical information comes from developers. That can in cases be seen as a biased source of information. I wouldn’t say there’s a dedicated group providing assistance to local governments when a project is proposed — which is a similar story to wind industry development, where we have only a handful of consultants who provide technical advice. It can be really helpful to get a multi-disciplinary approach to hearing information. It can be helpful to have the utility commission, public health folks, those in academia, as well as the developer.
As of right now, especially in rural areas, local governments have a hard task of balancing pushback while getting the most accurate, evidence-based, neutral information to make decisions. That balance can be contentious.
What is the federal government doing on data center policy? How is the Trump administration approaching it?
A few things there. In the early days, the drive was for AI expansion and to be competitive with foreign adversaries. Now due to the amount of public pushback in red and blue localities and a more cautious approach.
I’m not seeing a lot of actual policy movement at this time.
I know the EPA is looking at the chemicals used in cooling data centers because when that water is cycled through the system, some of it is discharged into the water system, so they’re looking at the Toxic Substances and Control Act for monitoring that.
How much of an impact does this minimal federal role have on industry behavior?
Y’know, this isn’t specific to data centers. This is true for all kinds of large-scale development: there’s a need to require some sort of federal monitoring and regulation.
That’s where I see an emerging role for public health. At the federal level, there could be policy movement towards requiring some sort of environmental monitoring at data centers to make sure they’re operating responsibility. Looking at specific water use relative to water availability and what happens when there’s a time of severe, persistent drought. With air quality too — we’ve seen areas where the grid isn’t as reliable so their diesel generators are kicking on more and affecting air quality for residents.
We’re just not seeing all of that right now. We need corporate disclosure.
What do you see as the most important public health impacts from data center development?
It varies by localities. The most discussed obviously is water usage. One thing I’d note about my conversations with folks enthusiastic around emerging tech is, there are still questions that need to be asked about the capacity of localities to support a data center. Like a small town in Kansas may only be using 40% of their water for their utility needs. If a data center came online, how much of that water goes to the data center?
One area underexplored within the public health discipline is energy poverty and energy security. The ability of a household to meet the needs of everything energy provides in our lives. It’s known we have an aging electric grid but we’re not talking enough about large-scale blackouts when the grid is not sufficient to support some of these new data centers.
1. Laramie County, Wyoming — Meta is fighting the fine it received in the Cheyenne data center water pollution controversy, and the conflict between the tech giant and the city’s small board of public utilities is continuing to spill out into the public.
Meta this week appealed the $10,000 fine that the board of public utilities issued over a rare bacteria found in Cheyenne’s sewer system. Meta is contesting any responsibility for the contaminant, claiming the board should’ve fined the construction company Fortis instead. You can read the full appeal here.
Afterwards, the board publicly released hundreds of pages of emails revealing how and why government employees linked the bacteria to Meta, specifically, including that officials tied the bacteria’s presence to the usage of closed-loop cooling systems for data centers. The emails also show local officials knew the water pollution was linked to the data center months earlier than previously thought. All the emails are available here.
Meanwhile, Cheyenne residents are attempting a long-shot bid to undo the annexation for the Microsoft data center I told you about. It’s unlikely to succeed because petitioners need to get about 10% of the last election cycle’s voting population to sign within 20 days… which at more than 2,000 people sounds all but impossible without a massive grassroots campaign.
2. Niagara County, New York — This county just rejected a solar project’s highway work permits in a show of retaliation against the state’s Office of Renewable Energy Siting.
Cypress Creek Renewables’ Bear Ridge solar project has become a legal test case in New York State over whether towns or county governments have the final say over renewable energy project construction — as opposed to ORES, which was granted permitting primacy under state law in 2024.
A state court ruled in March the town of Cambria lacked authority to veto the project after its ORES approval. Now, the county is taking a stab. County manager Rick Updegrove claimed in a July 20 letter to Cypress Creek Renewables that the renewables developer’s application to build its Bear Ridge solar project was approved by ORES with overly broad authority and too large of a construction work area. And most importantly: he thinks ORES doesn’t have authority to permit this project at all.
The letter’s point of view: ORES “does not have the legal authority to grant you permission for construction within county rights-of-way,” and so “therefore, Niagara County is denying your requests for all Highway Work Permits related to the Bear Ridge Solar Project. In addition, you are denied any permission to enter our rights-of-way and should you disturb these areas, we will take enforcement actions.”
I’m thinking about Niagara County as the deadline fast approaches for ORES to comply with attempts at federal oversight from the Trump administration on compliance with federal prime agriculture rules.
3. Barron County, Wisconsin — The anti-solar protest is the new campaign stop in deep red Wisconsin.
Solar-loving politics watchers be warned: Next Friday, July 31, GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Tom Tiffany is marqueeing a town hall meeting in rural Barren County around fighting a single solar farm — an MN8 Energy project known as Sandhill Solar. Opposition to Sandhill Solar only started manifesting publicly about a month ago and it seems to center around farmland preservation.
Like in New York with ORES, Wisconsin’s state Public Service Commission has primary authority over counties and towns when it comes to approving solar or wind projects. That’s why we’ve seen previous campaigns against projects overridden by the PSC, which has the power to ultimately find the project serves a broader public interest and therefore should be approved.
In this case however, Sandhill Solar hasn’tsubmitted its application to the PSC. There is a considerable risk that Tiffany backing the opposition to the project could lead to ripple effects at the state level — and if he wins, I anticipate he will take action to rein in this primary authority generally. Given the unpredictability of this governor’s election, the race is on for this project.
4. Chesapeake, Virginia — A large battery storage project on the Virginia coastline is on the rocks amidst rampant local opposition.
An Equinor subsidiary, East Point Energy, rescinded its application before the Chesapeake City Council on the same day it was teed up for a vote on a crucial conditional use permit. There was certainly a risk of rejection at that vote. Now we wait to see if it survives; it’s not entirely dead because East Point Energy can still refile an application and local unions with workers contracted for the project are up in arms over the risk of cancellation. The company hasn’t said yes or no to the future, though.
It’s worth saying this is a dead zone for renewables projects. The Heatmap Pro database ranks the independent city of Chesapeake and the surrounding perimeter in the 96th percentile of all U.S. jurisdictions where projects are rejected and this is not the first battery denied here.
Still, any sign of a burgeoning BESS backlash in Virginia should be worrisome to the state lawmakers who just enacted a law setting storage deployment targets.
5. Lewis County, West Virginia — West Virginia is now a key battleground in the fight over transmission, as a line spanning all of West Virginia and Maryland — and cutting through Data Center Alley in Virginia — causes compounding consternation.
On Tuesday, the Lewis County Commission formally voted to send a letter opposing the Valley North transmission line, making it the second county to do so with more neighboring counties potentially next. This is a different conflict than the one over the MARL line, a similarly sited and data center-centric transmission project.
There is no final path for the line and it’s still so early we haven’t reached the stages of permitting where county opposition really counts. But its a very troubling sign for the future of wires in this incredibly electricity-hungry region to see so much upset early in development.
