The fallout from Vineyard Wind's broken turbine blade

When Nantucket residents began posting photos of the fiberglass and foam littering their beaches on the morning of July 16, everyone in the offshore wind world — proponents and opponents, alike — knew the industry was about to face a very public test in confidence.

The debris had fallen from a damaged turbine blade at the nearby Vineyard Wind project. The part, made and installed by GE Vernova, had broken three days earlier, and no one really knew why.

The project’s developer, also called Vineyard Wind, scrambled to clean up the mess and assure the public that the material all over their pristine beaches was “non-toxic.” But more and more photos of the bright green debris washed up on social media, many carrying captions like “It’s everywhere” and “STOP #Bigwind!”

Soon, a picture of the broken turbine itself surfaced. The 351-foot blade had snapped about 65 feet from the base and what remained of it hung slackly, dangling over the ocean.

It was not a good look for an industry already struggling against economic headwinds and public concern about its impacts on the ocean environment. Plus, as the first large-scale offshore wind farm to earn federal approval, Vineyard Wind has always been under intense public scrutiny.

Within hours, clean energy and anti-wind advocates had jumped on the story, and two competing narratives took hold. To one camp, the broken blade and resulting fiberglass pollution was a hiccup — an unfortunate accident that posed a challenging, yet manageable, clean up effort and was unlikely to have long-term ramifications for the offshore wind industry. To the other camp, it was a wake-up call — proof that offshore wind is “dangerous” and “dirty” and that the whole industry should be stopped.

It didn’t help that GE Vernova couldn’t immediately explain why the blade had broken.

It also wasn't the first time this type of blade had failed; the same model, the Haliade-X, was damaged during installation at an offshore wind project near the U.K. in May.

“What is to keep this from happening again? Because here’s twice now it’s happened in two months,” Dan Pronk, lobster fisherman on Nantucket, said during a Select Board hearing the day after the debris started washing up. “We haven’t even had winter yet, never mind a hurricane. What’s going to happen when that happens?"

Eleven days after the incident, GE Vernova announced the preliminary results of its investigation into the situation and concluded that the problem stemmed from a manufacturing error at a factory in Canada. For wind power supporters, this announcement reinforced their beliefs — this was a one-off error, not a fundamental flaw with the blade design or engineering.

And so far, offshore wind experts seem to agree. This might have some short-term impacts on the Vineyard Wind project, but it’s unlikely to have a lasting detrimental effect on the wider industry.

“This incident can delay the project commissioning. [And] there could be a financial impact on the companies due to costs associated with cleanup, equipment repair/replacement and potential penalties,” Atin Jain, an analyst with BloombergNEF, wrote in an email. But “in the long-term, I think it will just be a bump in the road for U.S. offshore wind's journey.”

Still, this doesn’t mean the blade saga is necessary over. The failure has inflamed tensions in the Nantucket community, where many were already skeptical of — if not outright opposed to — offshore wind development, and it’s fired up other critics of offshore wind in the country like fishermen.

Several experts who study public opinion and renewable energy said that outrage over incidents like this can resurface at unexpected moments. And at a time when many East Coast states are banking on offshore wind to deliver large amounts of renewable energy to the grid and help fight climate change, the stakes are high.

The alert came into the Vineyard Wind office on Saturday July 13: Something was wrong with a turbine in the project.

The company soon learned that “one of the blades was broken and folded over” on a non-operational turbine that was undergoing testing, Klaus Moeller, Vineyard Wind’s CEO explained during a Nantucket Select Board hearing. In response, employees established a 500-meter “safety-zone” perimeter around the turbine and notified the Coast Guard, mariners and ​​the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. They also preemptively shut down all power operations, he said.

“There is a protocol for this,” Moeller said.

Next, they set about trying to retrieve the largest pieces of debris they knew had fallen into the water while trying to determine where the current might move the smaller stuff.

By Monday, Vineyard Wind notified officials on Nantucket that remnants of the broken turbine would likely start washing up on the south side of the Island. A day later, several beaches were littered with hunks of fiberglass and foam.

The debris immediately caused a public outcry on the Island. The Harbormaster closed several beaches. Local businesses, like a surf school, suffered. And residents worried about potential long-term environmental impacts — how would anyone remove all of the tiny, sharp shards of fiberglass from the beach? If the shellfish ingested any of the material, would they still be safe to eat? And what about the chemicals in the glue and resin of a turbine blade? Would those get into the water?

The company tried to assure the public that the material was non-toxic and would be cleaned up. But not everyone was convinced.

Tim Lepore, a physician on the Island, told WBUR he was upset by the company’s insistence that this material didn’t pose a threat to the public or marine ecosystem.

“I consider things that are non-toxic [to be] things you can put on a sandwich,” he said.

Adam Dread, an attorney on the Island, felt similarly, telling WCAI, “This is just a nightmare — plastics and fiberglass and styrofoam. The worst things we can get. It's bad for marine life. It's bad for everything.”

What’s more, the public was left worrying that this could happen again. Vineyard Wind is just one of many offshore wind projects planned for the Atlantic coast.

As public fears erupted at a Select Board hearing Wednesday night — “We’re having our own Exxon-Valdez” one woman, a retired school teacher, exclaimed — advocates of offshore wind tried to put the situation in what they argued was much-needed context.

“You'll never hear me say that this was an incident without impact,” said Amber Hewitt, who directs the National Wildlife Federation’s offshore wind program, but “we still believe that offshore wind is one of the safest forms of energy available to us. And when you compare this to other energy disasters in the ocean, this is a fairly contained and easily cleaned up incident.”

Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation agreed: “Vineyard Wind has to be held accountable for cleaning up every bit of debris that hits the water or hits the beaches, but you have to keep this in perspective. Offshore wind turbines have operated safely around the world for decades with very few incidents.”

There were no oil-drenched birds. The ocean was not on fire. These turbines were made from a lot of the same material as boat hulls.

“All energy development and all large-scale construction comes with risks of failure,” Hewitt said. “And that’s, I think, just what we’re witnessing here.”

But Bonnie Brady isn’t buying it.

“I don't want to accuse myself of being Chicken Little here, but I've been trying for a long time to say these aren't really what you think,” she said.

Brady is the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association and is married to a commercial fisherman who often works in the waters near Vineyard Wind. She’s also one of the most prominent offshore wind critics in the Northeast, and in that role has been arguing for years — online, at public meetings — that offshore wind turbines are not safe or environmentally friendly.

“This has been a real awakening for people who never thought that offshore wind would have an effect on them,” she said. “And as a result, maybe they’re seeing it with new eyes.”

That concern was apparent in the days following the fiberglass tides. Some residents who spoke at the two most recent Select Board hearings said they had never expected anything like this to happen. And lifeguard Dylan Giovine told WCAI that the situation has hardened his views about offshore wind.

“I was anti-[offshore wind] I think because I had heard that it probably wasn’t going to be good for the environment,” he said. “And now it definitely seems that way.”

Still, without any polling, it’s hard to know whether people's opinion about wind power is changing. About a month before the incident, a Barr Foundation poll found that 82% of Massachusetts residents have a favorable view of offshore wind.

While the photos of the flotsam in the water and on the beach, and of the broken turbine, are powerful images that have already been amplified by prominent offshore wind opponents and communities hoping to stop offshore wind development near them, the broken Vineyard Wind blade has largely remained a local story. At least so far.

“A lot of the anti-offshore wind groups are just throwing up whatever they can and seeing what sticks to the wall,” said Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University and a coauthor of a report about how fossil fuel interests and climate denial think tanks are supporting local anti-offshore wind groups.

“They don’t have to prove that [offshore wind] is bad, but if anything sticks, then they’ve succeeded really in trying to turn public opinion.”

Look no further than concerns about offshore wind and whales, he said. Despite several scientists and the federal government saying again and again that there is no evidence that any offshore wind activity has harmed a whale or contributed to its death or stranding, a network of fossil fuel interest groups and right-wing think tanks have helped make a lot of people believe the opposite.

“This stuff stays out there,” he said. “Once it's up, it can keep traveling.”

Sarah Mills, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies how renewables energy projects impact rural communities, said old stories about broken turbines or solar panels often resurface at unpredictable times.

According to Mills, anti-renewable sentiments “really spin out of control” when no one knows what caused an accident or when people don’t feel like the developer is being honest about impacts.

“Every energy source has positives at the local level and it has negatives. Every single one. There is no perfect source of energy,” she said. “So finding ways that we can acknowledge what those negative impacts are, and finding ways to mitigate them to the extent possible, I think that’s really important.”

Companies shouldn’t promise that failures like this will never happen again, she said. Instead, they should make sure the public understands what lessons they've learned and how they'll try to prevent another accident in the future.

“Setting appropriate expectations is really important,” she said — especially in the case of early projects like Vineyard Wind, which can influence how people think about future projects.

Less than three weeks out, the story of Vineyard Wind's broken blade isn't finished. Construction and power generation at the project remains halted. The company is still cleaning up the debris, some of which washed up on Martha’s Vineyard earlier this week. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is still investigating the incident. GE Vernova is also still investigating what happened and reinspecting all 150 blades made in the same Canadian factory as the one that broke.

Advocates on both sides of the issue have dug in their heels and tried to spread their message that offshore wind is either a safe and smart solution to the states' clean energy goals, or a dangerous boondoggle.

How people ultimately perceive what happened at the flagship offshore wind project could influence their willingness to support — or try to block — this nascent industry in the U.S. And the outcome there could have big ramifications for state and national climate goals.

Many people in Massachusetts may remember how public opposition helped sink Cape Wind, the state’s first attempt at offshore wind. The project's failure became a major setback to the industry in the U.S.

“Public opinion absolutely matters,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. “The politics of this are very real [and] can change.”