Taylon Breanne begins each day with a quick stroll on the soft sand of Stone’s Beach on the island of Nantucket. One morning last month, she noticed something unusual: chunks of what looked like green foam littering the sand, along with glittery ribbons she couldn’t identify.
When she realized the source of the debris, her confusion turned to shock.
The blade of a massive offshore wind turbine had crumpled, dropping most of its 351-foot length into the sea in a shower of fiberglass and foam.
Breanne, 32, describes herself as a climate activist who backs the transition from fossil fuels “100 percent.” But last month’s accident left her shaken. She’s worried about the marine life ingesting the wreckage and its longer-term impact on the waters around Nantucket.
“We don’t want to be an experiment,” she said. “We just want to halt any more turbines until we get to the bottom of how we do this better.”
The July 13 accident represents a highly public setback for a crucial form of renewable energy. It unfolded at Vineyard Wind, the nation’s largest offshore wind project, just months after the much-anticipated installation began delivering power to the New England grid.
Regulators have shut down power generation at the project indefinitely as they probe what caused the blade to fail. Opponents of offshore wind are seizing on the situation to redouble their efforts to delay or cancel projects in more than a dozen states from New Jersey to Oregon.
On Nantucket, a popular vacation spot off Cape Cod, the accident led to a temporary closure of beaches along its southern shore. Among residents, the distress about the debris is “universal,” said Brooke Mohr, chair of the Nantucket Select Board.
In a place where many livelihoods revolve around tourism, fishing or harvesting the island’s highly prized scallops, the fear is about “the impacts on the lives that we live here,” Mohr said. “We don’t really know.”
Vineyard Wind is a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. Roger Martella, an executive at GE Vernova, the turbine manufacturer, told a public meeting in late July that a preliminary analysis indicates the blade’s collapse was caused by a faulty adhesive, a defect that should have been caught in the inspection process. Federal regulators are conducting their own investigation into the cause.
Debris began washing up on Nantucket on July 16, but pieces of the damaged blade – which “peeled like a banana,” Mohr said – have continued to fall into the sea, most recently on Sunday. They’ve also turned up on the neighboring island of Martha’s Vineyard and on Cape Cod itself.
Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova have established a “rigorous debris recovery system by land, sea and air,” Craig Gilvarg, a Vineyard Wind spokesman, said in a statement.
To remove the remnants of the damaged blade, GE Vernova is working with Resolve Marine, the maritime salvage firm that helped clear the wreckage at Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The company also is paying an outside firm to conduct an environmental assessment of the accident.
This all comes at a tricky time for the offshore wind business, which has been beset by high borrowing costs, inflationary pressures and supply-chain problems. Since mid-2023, developers have canceled contracts to build 8.9 gigawatts of offshore wind power in the United States – representing 35 percent of all such deals, according to Atin Jain, a wind power specialist at BloombergNEF, an energy research firm.
There’s also deep disquiet in the industry over what a second Trump administration could mean for offshore wind, which remains in its nascent phases in this country. Donald Trump has made no secret of his hostility to the technology. In April, he told a group of oil and gas executives: “I hate wind.” At a rally on the New Jersey shore the following month, he went further.
“They destroy everything; they’re horrible,” Trump said after referring to an offshore wind project backed by Gov. Phil Murphy (D). “They ruin the environment; they kill the birds; they kill the whales.”
What happened at Vineyard Wind is “a highly visible incident that doesn’t paint a great picture” of the industry, said Timothy Fox of ClearView Energy Partners, a research firm in Washington. For a candidate like Trump, it “adds fuel to the fire.”
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At the same time, Fox said, a single accident is “very unlikely” to alter the push by Northeastern states to use offshore wind as the focus of their transition toward renewable energy sources. Massachusetts, for example, is requiring utilities to procure a total of 5.6 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2027. That figure would generate power equivalent to 45 percent of the state’s current annual consumption, Fox noted.
Jain expects the accident at Vineyard Wind – which he calls “shocking, but rare” – to delay the project’s completion. In the long run, though, he considers it a “bump in the road” in the country’s journey toward increased use of offshore wind.
Opponents are pointing to the blade collapse as a reason for caution. It followed an incident in the North Sea off the coast of England this spring, when the same type of turbine blade came apart. GE Vernova said an installation error at sea was to blame.
Heather Munro Mann, executive director of the Midwater Trawlers Association in Oregon, called the latest event “a wake-up call” that she’s raising in conversations with elected officials in Washington. “These are the kind of things we were worried about happening – and they are happening,” she said.
Back on Nantucket, Vineyard Wind sent teams to pick up debris on the beaches and vessels to fish it out of nearby waters. Locals were not mollified. At lengthy town meetings, they’ve urged the select board to scrap or delay the project, even though such a step is not within its authority. Some said they were worried about how the turbines could be damaged during a hurricane or winter storm.
Jesse Sandole, 37, was born and raised on the island and owns a fish market there. He has no issue with building wind turbines on land but strongly opposes what he calls the “full-scale industrialization of the ocean.” He’s concerned about what will happen once the turbines reach the end of their usable life in several decades and how they will be decommissioned.
Mohr and other Nantucket officials have said that they will revisit the “Good Neighbor Agreement” the town signed, a contract obligating Vineyard Wind to take steps to minimize the project’s impact on the island’s panoramic views and to contribute $16 million to a community fund.
“The circumstances surrounding Nantucket’s relationship with the Vineyard Wind project have changed in light of this incident,” Mohr said.
Gaven Norton, 33, owns a surf school on the south shore. The accident tanked his business for days: First, the beaches were closed. Then, people canceled their lessons because they were afraid of fiberglass fragments in the water or on the sand. “It killed the whole week,” he said.
Before the accident, he hadn’t thought much about the offshore turbines that one day just seemed to appear on the horizon. “Now it seems that people are asking more questions,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”