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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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SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
The company will use the seed funding to bring on more engineers — and customers.
As extreme weather becomes the norm, utilities are scrambling to improve the grid’s resilience, aiming to prevent the types of outages and infrastructure damage that often magnify the impact of already disastrous weather events. Those events cost the U.S. $182 billion in damages last year alone.
With the intensity of storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires growing every year, some utilities are now turning to artificial intelligence in their quest to adapt to new climate realities. Rhizome, which just announced a $6.5 million seed round, uses AI to help assess and prevent climate change-induced grid infrastructure vulnerabilities. It’s already working with utilities such as Avangrid, Seattle City Light, and Vermont Electric Power Company to do so.
“With a combination of utility system data and historical weather and hazard information, and then climate projection information, we can build a full profile of likelihood and consequence of failure at a very high resolution,” Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mish Thadani told me.
While utilities often have lots of data about the history of their assets and the surrounding landscape, there’s no real holistic system to bring together these disparate datasets and provide a simple overview of systemic risk across a range of different scenarios. Utilities usually rely on historical data to make decisions about their assets — a practice that’s increasingly unhelpful as climate change makes previously rare extreme weather events more likely.
Rhizome aims to solve both problems, serving as an integrated platform for risk assessment and mitigation that incorporates forward-looking climate modeling into its projections. The company measures its success against modeled counterfactuals that determine avoided power outages and the economic losses associated with these hypothetical blackouts. “So we can say the anticipated failure rate across the system for a Category 1 hurricane was X, and after you invest in the system, it will be Y,” Thadani told me. “Or if you’ve made a bunch of investments in the system, and you do experience a Category 1 hurricane, what would have been the failure rate had those investments not been made?”
This allows utilities to provide regulators with much more robust data to back up their funding requests. So while Thadani expects electricity prices to continue to rise and ratepayers to bear the burden, he told me that Rhizome can ultimately help regulators and utilities keep costs in check by making sure that every dollar spent on risk mitigation goes as far as possible.
Rhizome’s seed round, which came in oversubscribed, was led by the early-stage tech-focused venture firm Base10 Partners, which aims to automate traditional sectors of the economy. Additional funders include climate investors MCJ and CLAI, as well as the wildfire-focused venture firm Convective Capital. In addition to its standard risk assessment system, Rhizome has also developed a wildfire-specific risk mitigation tool. This quantifies not only how likely a hazard is to occur and its potential impact on utility infrastructure, but also the probability that an equipment failure would spark a wildfire, based on the geography of the area and historical ignition data.
Thadani told me that he considers evaluating wildfire risk “to be the next step in a sequence” as a utility evaluates the threats to its system overall. So while customers can choose to adopt either the standard product or the wildfire-specific product, many could gain utility from both, he said. The company has also developed a third offering specifically tailored for municipal and cooperative utilities. This more affordable system doesn’t provide the same machine learning-powered cost-benefit metrics, but can still help these smaller entities evaluate their infrastructure’s vulnerability.
Right now, Rhizome has a “lean and mighty” team of just 11 people, Thadani told me. With this latest raise, he said that the company will immediately hire five or six engineers, primarily to do further research and development. As Rhizome looks to onboard more and larger customers, it’s planning to incorporate more advanced modeling features into its platform and operate it increasingly autonomously, such that the model can retrain itself as new weather, climate, and utility data becomes available.
The company is out of the pilot phase with most of its customers, Thadani said, having signed multiple enterprise software contracts. That’s big, as utilities have gained a reputation for showing an initial appetite for testing innovative technologies, only to balk at the cost of full-scale deployment. Thadani told me Rhizome has been able to avoid this so-called “pilot purgatory” by making a point to engage with senior-level stakeholders at utilities — not just the innovation teams — to “graduate from that pilot ecosystem more quickly.”
Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.