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Plus answers to other pressing questions about the offshore wind project.
The blade that snapped off an offshore turbine at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts on July 13 broke due to a manufacturing defect, according to GE Vernova, the turbine maker and installer.
During GE’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Scott Strazik and Vice President of Investor Relations Michael Lapides said there was no indication of a design flaw in the blade. Rather, the company has identified a “material deviation” at one of its factories in Gaspé, Canada.
“Because of that, we're going to use our existing data and re-inspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind,” Strazik told investors, adding that the factory has produced about 150 blades total.
Company executives shared more details about their findings at a public meeting in Nantucket on Wednesday night. Roger Martella, GE Vernova’s chief sustainability officer, said there were two issues at play. The first was the manufacturing issue — basically, the adhesives applied to the blade to hold it together did not do their job. The second was quality control. “The inspection that should have caught this did not,” he said. “So it’s a combination of the two factors.”
Two dozen turbines have been installed as part of the Vineyard Wind project so far, with 72 blades total. GE Vernova has not responded to requests for clarification about how many of them originated at the Gaspé facility.
The re-inspection process does not involve physically inspecting each blade, Martella explained. The company takes “incredibly detailed ultrasound pictures” of every blade it produces, he said, and will be reviewing the images as “a desktop exercise.” He likened the process to getting a second, more detailed opinion from a doctor on an MRI. When asked why the company did not catch the defect the first time these scans were inspected, Martella said answering that is part of the ongoing investigation. In the meantime, blade production at the factory is on pause.
GE also stressed that the incident at Vineyard Wind was unrelated to a blade failure at the Dogger Bank wind farm in the U.K. earlier this year, which was due to an installation error. Installation has resumed at Dogger Bank.
Tensions were high at Wednesday night’s meeting, where Nantucket residents again lined up to lambast Vineyard Wind. Select Board chair Brooke Mohr opened the meeting by saying that the incident has shown the inadequacy of the Good Neighbor Agreement, a settlement between the town and Vineyard Wind reached in 2020. Under the agreement, the company would contribute $4 million to a community fund and take steps to minimize visual impacts of the wind farm. In return, the town would “convey support” for the project to the community and to state and federal officials. Mohr said the town now intends to renegotiate these terms. “The Select Board is committed to holding vineyard wind and GE, the manufacturer of the turbine blades, accountable,” she said.
Town representatives are going to meet with Vineyard Wind next week to negotiate compensation for the costs it has incurred as a result of the accident.
Meanwhile, on the ground and in the water around Nantucket, crews from Vineyard Wind and GE continued to collect blade debris on Wednesday morning, for the ninth day straight. An initial environmental assessment of the blade debris published late Tuesday night began to answer key questions about the risks all that debris poses to people and marine life.
The report was commissioned by GE and conducted by Arcadis US, an engineering and environmental consultancy. It asserts that the primary risk to people is injury from the sharp edges of fiberglass fragments and that the debris “are considered inert, non-soluble, stable, and nontoxic.”
It also cautions, however, that further evaluation will be required to understand the risks posed by any blade materials that remain in the environment, such as assessing the potential for degradation. At the meeting in Nantucket on Wednesday night, one resident asked whether they should be worried about eating fish or shellfish that may have ingested pieces of the blade. Jim Nuss, one of the authors of the Arcadis report, said the firm had “not considered that yet,” and that it would be “one of the future looking activities.”
One particularly concerning question has been whether the debris could discharge dangerous per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals,” into the environment. Though there are no PFAS used in the blade construction itself, the firm did identify the chemicals in “aerodynamic add-ons,” small 6 inch by 8 inch pieces of plastic that are installed on the outside of the blade to improve its efficiency that are also commonly used on airplanes, it said.
According to the report, the total amount of PFAS on one blade equals 28.2 grams, or about 0.06 pounds. To put that in perspective, the chemical company Daikin once estimated it would release roughly 200 pounds of PFAS per day into the wastewater at one of its paper mills, according to federal filings obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund in 2018. It’s not yet clear how many of those plastic “add-ons” made it into the ocean.
A comprehensive list of all materials that make up the blades shows that more than half, by weight, is fiberglass. The other key ingredients include carbon fiber and PET foam, a common construction material. “There are 33 different materials involved in the production of a turbine blade, from the most basic common household adhesives to the more complex industrial materials used to build the blade,” the report says.
An introduction to the report notes that GE is creating an inventory of the debris collected to assess how much of the blade has been recovered. The company has also hired Resolve Marine, a marine salvage firm, to aid in dismantling the remainder of the blade that’s still attached to the turbine, though it didn’t offer a timeline for this work.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the events of the July 24 Nantucket Select Board meeting.
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The Esmeralda 7 project is another sign that Trump’s solar freeze is over.
The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.
The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.
To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.
A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”
Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.
The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.
The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.
But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”
Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.
For the first time, his administration targets an offshore wind project already under construction.
The Trump administration will try to stop work on Empire Wind, an offshore wind project by Equinor south of Long Island that was going through active construction, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted to X on Wednesday.
Burgum announced that he directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to “halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
A memo to the agency, which was obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, references “revelations” of “serious deficiencies” in the approval process for Empire Wind. The reported memo does not provide any further description or evidence to back this claim. When we requested comment on the Free Beacon story, an Interior spokesperson simply pointed to Burgum’s short announcement.
Equinor provided a statement to Heatmap confirming after Burgum’s announcement that it “just received a notification from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) regarding our Empire Wind 1 project, which has been in construction since 2024.”
“We will engage directly with BOEM and the Department of Interior to understand the questions raised about the permits we have received from authorities,” Equinor spokesman David Schoetz said. “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.”
This is the second fully permitted offshore wind project that the Trump administration has publicly targeted and attempted to stop.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, a wind farm under development off the coast of New Jersey, after anti-wind groups petitioned the agency to do so. The agency did not attempt to justify its decision other than to say that it gives the agency “the opportunity to reevaluate the Project and its environmental impacts in light of” Trump’s executive order requesting an assessment of the government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.
A few days later, we were first to report that Representative Chris Smith — one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress — asked Burgum to halt work on Empire Wind, asserting that the environmental review process for the project was “completely inadequate.”
If Empire Wind is indeed halted, it would be the first offshore wind project under construction to be stopped by the Trump administration. Equinor disclosed in a project update that it started subsea rock installation last month, although the company’s statement to Heatmap indicates construction may have begun as early as last year. A halt to work on Empire Wind would cast a shadow over other offshore wind projects under construction, including Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia project, which we scooped could also wind up in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Stopping Empire Wind would also mean a huge blow to New York State’s climate and clean energy goals.
After the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant closed in 2021, the population-dense metro area in and around New York City has mostly replaced that carbon-free source of energy with natural gas. Offshore wind was supposed to be a path to moving away from reliance on the fossil fuel. The state’s target of deploying 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 was already going to be nearly impossible due to Trump’s pause on new leases and permits. Without the 800 megawatt Empire Wind project, New York will only have 1 gigawatt in the pipeline.
This news has already sparked an aggressive response from the American Clean Power Association, the largest renewables trade association, which released a statement pleading for the administration to “quickly address perceived inadequacies in the prior permit approvals” and that “halting construction of fully permitted energy projects is the literal opposite of an energy abundance agenda.”
“With skyrocketing energy demand and increasing consumer prices, we need streamlined permitting for all domestic energy resources,” American Clean Power CEO Jason Grumet stated. “Doubling back to reconsider permits after projects are under construction sends a chilling signal to all energy investment.”
“NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind related actions.”
A group of Republican lawmakers were hoping a new report released Monday would give them fresh ammunition in their fight against offshore wind development. Instead, they got … pretty much nothing. But they’re milking it anyway.
The report in question originated with a spate of whale deaths in early 2023. Though the deaths had no known connection to the nascent industry, they fueled a GOP campaign to shut down the renewable energy revolution that was taking place up and down the East Coast. New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith joined with three of his colleagues to solicit the Government Accountability Office to launch an investigation into the impacts of offshore wind on the environment, maritime safety, military operations, commercial fishing, and other concerns.
The resulting document is more of an overview than an investigation, and its findings are far from the smoking gun Republicans were looking for. Its main message is that the government and developers should do a better job engaging with Tribes and the fishing industry. As for whales, it basically shrugs. “NOAA Fisheries does not anticipate any death or serious injury to whales from offshore wind related actions and has not recorded marine mammal deaths from offshore wind activities,” it says.
But Smith seized on other findings to declare that the report “gives credibility and vindication” to concerns he has raised about offshore wind, pointing specifically to a section about defense and radar systems. The steel in offshore wind turbines has “high electromagnetic reflectivity,” which can disrupt certain radar systems, the report says. In a short paragraph about strategies to mitigate the issue, it notes that the Department of Defense can request that certain areas be excluded from development — which it has already done — or curtail operations as needed.
Smith also highlighted a portion of the report that says “large shipping vessels may have trouble avoiding turbines in the event of a mechanical failure.” Most projects on the East Coast have proposed spacing turbines at least 1 nautical mile apart, but shipping vessels may need up to 2 nautical miles in the event they need to make a sharp turn. The report doesn’t make any specific recommendations, but notes that the BOEM can prohibit construction within a certain distance of shipping lanes and require developers to create a “lighting, marking, and signaling plan” to improve safety.
Smith recently joined anti-offshore wind activists calling on the government to halt work on Empire Wind 1, an offshore wind farm off the coast of New York and New Jersey developed by Equinor that started construction this month. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, he wrote that the environmental review process under the Biden administration “was completely inadequate,” and that the Empire Wind project could thus be “catastrophic.”
The GAO report finds little fault in the previous administration’s environmental review process. It does, however, identify “gaps in Interior’s oversight of development.” For example, the BOEM has been inconsistent in the way it consults with Tribes to identify areas for wind development, as well as in how it considers or addresses the concerns Tribes raise. Part of the problem, per the report, is that Tribes have limited capacity to review documents and engage with the agency, and that government grants meant to address this gap are inaccessible because they require the Tribes to cover some of the costs. The report also finds that while the agency has taken steps to incorporate the fishing industry’s concerns into developing new lease areas, it hasn’t adequately communicated those steps to the industry. In addition, while the agency has called for a compensation mechanism to reimburse fishing companies for losses related to offshore wind, it has not yet established one.
The five recommendations the GAO makes in light of its findings are all related to boosting agency capacity for engagement and information sharing. Far from building up the office, however, the Trump administration has laid off more than 2,000 interior department employees, including eight of the roughly 80 staffers who worked on planning and permitting offshore wind.
Smith is taking the report’s findings — including a note that there are still unknowns about offshore wind’s impacts — as proof that development should be shut down. “Ocean wind energy development is an egregiously flawed and dangerous initiative and must be stopped,” he said in a press release Monday.