On a February afternoon in 2019, Vineyard Wind executives came to the Great Hall of the Nantucket Atheneum to make their case directly to island residents that their planned 166,000-acre wind farm southwest of the island would provide clean, renewable energy, with minimal visual and environmental effects on Nantucket or its waters.

But just over five years later, with the project suspended by federal officials, and with thousands of pieces of fiberglass and foam board from a crumbling blade strewn across the island’s South Shore, those promises of clean energy feel empty.

The question for a growing number of residents, environmental groups, and town officials is not just what went wrong, but whether Vineyard Wind or GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the 350-foot blades, knew those blades could fail—and what happens when the rest of Vineyard Wind’s proposed 62 turbines fall in the path of a winter nor’easter or a hurricane.

“The number of failures [in offshore wind] are relatively small, however as these machines go bigger and bigger, we have seen a bit of an uptick in the number of failures,” Todd Griffith, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, said.



Vineyard Wind completed construction on its first turbine last October, using GE Vernova’s Haliade-X, touted as the “largest turbine in the Western world.”

On July 13, the company learned one of its blades had collapsed into the Atlantic. It notified the town two days later, just as pieces of the blade began washing up on shore. Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Moeller identified those shards as nontoxic, though that definition has also been called into question.

GE Vernova officials claimed the blade failure was an isolated event and “not a fundamental design flaw.” In a July earnings call, CEO Scott Strazik blamed the event on a “material deviation or a manufacturing deviation in one of our factories that, through the inspection or quality assurance process, we should have identified.”

But those answers did not satisfy town officials, and past turbine failures show a pattern of issues. “Maybe they didn’t expect it to break and shatter into a billion pieces, but wait, it already happened once,” said Amy DiSibio, a board member of ACK for Whales, a grassroots organization opposed to the turbine project.

Just last May, a turbine blade in the Dogger Bank Wind Farm—a 277-turbine, 3.6-gigawatt offshore wind project roughly 62 miles east of Newcastle upon Tyne, England—crumbled into the North Sea.

But other failures have occurred with land-based turbines. GE Cypress model onshore turbines have suffered multiple broken blades and a collapsed turbine in incidents in Sweden, Germany, and Lithuania.

In February, Texas-based wind company Mesquite Creek Wind LLC sued GE Vernova in the New York Supreme Court, claiming GE took eight months to investigate a group of turbines that suffered damage from lightning strikes in 2015. In its delayed inspection, GE Vernova identified a handful of damaged turbines, though one year later, plaintiffs claimed the company admitted additional damage had occurred prior to its initial inspection—a case of fraudulent misrepresentation, according to the plaintiffs.

In a separate case in May, energy company American Electric Power took GE Vernova to court over “numerous material defects on major components” and “several complete failures” on a wind farm in Oklahoma, including one failure to a turbine blade and an “even larger portion” that “exhibited one or more material defects that are reasonably expected to result in failures within their useful service life that will require expensive repairs.”

What’s more, Vineyard Wind’s blade failure came on a breezy summer day, when weather charts showed Nantucket faced winds between 6 and 13 mph from the south-southwest. Compare that to a Category 1 hurricane (74-95 mph sustained winds) or a Category 3 major hurricane (111-129 mph).

“This endeavor is a learn-as-we-go experience,” Val Oliver, the founder of ACK for Whales, said. “We are the guinea pigs of this industry and if I’m not mistaken, these are the largest turbines ever built so of course there’s no information on failure or how they’re built because they’re just getting built now.”

Vineyard Wind’s turbines themselves sit comfortably in federal waters, outside of state and local jurisdiction, in an area where the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has leased 10 offshore wind sites, part of a major advancement in offshore wind intended to replace traditional fossil fuels.

As Vineyard Wind started to secure funding and federal approval, town officials in 2020 signed a so-called good neighbor agreement with Vineyard Wind, the Maria Mitchell Association, and Nantucket Preservation Trust. The partnership requires Vineyard Wind to fork out $16 million to signatories in remediation for the wind farm, and in return, the town would “convey support for the projects” and “inform federal, state, and local elected officials of their support for the projects” through its permitting process.

At the time the agreement was signed, the primary concern for town officials was the project’s visibility from the island and what that could mean for Nantucket’s designation as a national historic landmark. But the agreement also acknowledged the possibility of damage, stating: “The Parties recognize that the development of offshore wind power projects are subject to many risks and uncertainties, that there is no assurance that the Projects will obtain permits and approvals necessary for development and construction or receive necessary financing, and that Vineyard Wind may abandon a Project at any time, at its sole discretion.” It goes on to state that neither Vineyard Wind nor its affiliates will be held liable for any failure to receive financing, if it abandons the project or for any “consequential or punitive damages, whether or not foreseeable.”

One week after the blade failure, the Nantucket Select Board said it would renegotiate the terms of that agreement. “Our hands are not completely tied,” said Select Board member Dawn Hill Holdgate, who chaired the board when it signed the good neighbor agreement. “We agreed if we have a real problem we would start with remediation. This is very different from what’s in the agreement about the visual impact.”

In response to the blade collapse, GE Vernova launched a root-cause analysis to determine any necessary adjustments to its turbines to avoid future failures, Chief Sustainability Officer Roger Martella said, calling the blade failure “highly unusual and rare.” In that analysis, GE Vernova said it will look at all of its Haliade-X blades, including blades coming off the production line at Canadian manufacturing plant LM Wind, as well as the blades already installed, by using computer records—though some Nantucketers, including ACK for Whales, do not believe that process will prove thorough. “It’s reactive and cheap to look back at the X-rays,” DiSibio said.

DiSibio is now asking whether the installation of the turbines was simply a matter of putting up the most powerful devices available and doing it quickly. “They’re in a race to get this stuff up,” she said. “They want their production tax credits. It’s all about money.”

The 850-foot-tall, 14.7-megawatt turbines received independent certification following three years of prototype testing from Norwegian assurance and risk management company DNV (Det Norske Veritas) in December 2022. At the time, GE Vernova boasted the turbines would be a “proven and bankable technology for customers seeking financing,” and said they would “set a new benchmark in lowering offshore wind’s levelized cost of energy” and make “offshore wind energy a more affordable source of renewable energy.”

Vincent Schellings, GE Vernova’s head of product management, said at the time that GE’s engineers “have learned a great deal about how to maximize the performance of the Haliade-X,” adding that the certification “validates our ability to translate those lessons into more performance for customers using offshore wind to help mitigate climate change.”

But other aspects of its inspection process have given islanders pause. In 2019, GE sent one of its Haliade-X turbines to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center Wind Technology Testing Center in Boston for rigorous testing, though the turbines were too big for the facility, and the blade had to be cut to fit into the building. “The structural design as it gets more and more challenging, if you think about making anything bigger and bigger,” UT Dallas’ Griffith said, “you have higher loads, stronger forces on those machines.”

In the aftermath of the blade failure, Nantucket was left with a massive cleanup project. Thousands and thousands of increasingly smaller and smaller—some microscopic—pieces of foam board and fiberglass washed up on the island’s South Shore. Residents who cleaned the beaches were told to wear footwear and gloves to avoid potential contaminants from the debris field from Low Beach to Madaket—even though Vineyard Wind officials said the debris was nontoxic. Town officials closed all South Shore beaches the day after they were informed of the collapse.

ACK Surf School owner Gaven Norton said after the debris field washed up onshore, customers started canceling. “I have 25 employees that are now struggling with money because they can’t teach,” he told the Select Board. “It’s ruining my business short-term, but who knows how long this is going to go.”

In less than a week, the incident left more than 6 cubic yards of foam material and roughly 1.5 cubic yards of fiberglass on Nantucket’s beaches, according to a July 17 estimate from the Robert B. Our Company, which was hired by Vineyard Wind to clean up the pieces and haul them off-island. “To say that large pieces of floating debris and pieces of fiberglass in the environment was not harmful was questionable at best,” Emily Molden, executive director of the Nantucket Land and Water Council, said.

"Our big concern and disappointment was the initial, immediate downplay of the potential harm of the release by having them say that it was not toxic and not harmful to people and the environment,” she continued. “We recognize the real benefits of wind and offshore wind, but at the same time recognize that it’s an industry as well and this is a very unfortunate example of what can happen when we industrialize our offshore waters around the island.”

The blades themselves consist of nearly a dozen materials. More than 64 percent of each blade, by weight, is fiberglass, which includes a polyester resin and glass fiber made from silicon and oxygen. The blades also contain carbon planks, an adhesive called vinylester GT60 glue, balsa wood, and foam.

A preliminary environmental review conducted by GE Vernova’s consultant engineering and design firm Arcadis—the same group hired by the town for two coastal erosion projects—found the primary risk from the debris was potential physical injuries from contact with it. The report found the pieces of the turbine were “inert, non-soluble, stable and non-toxic,” similar to materials used in boating, packaging, textiles, and aviation. While the manufacturing of the blade includes no materials with the forever chemicals known as PFAS, the report finds 200 “aerodynamic add-ons” containing PTFE, considered a type of PFAS.

“It’s a matter of definition; it’s quite irritable,” Select Board member Malcolm MacNab, a former doctor, said. “I had a case once of someone with fiberglass in their eye and it wasn’t pretty. It is toxic material.”

What comes out of the blade failure is a question still up in the air. Holdgate said town officials are continuing to meet to review all options, though she would not say if the town is planning to file a suit against Vineyard Wind or GE Vernova.

State Sen. Julian Cyr argued the biggest step Vineyard Wind should take is to improve its communications with the town. Waiting two days from the failure to inform town officials of what happened is unacceptable, he said. But he argued that doesn’t mean the wind farm should be abandoned altogether. “Broadly speaking, moving toward clean energy and offshore wind remains a commonsense strategy for Massachusetts to lead on the climate crisis,” Cyr said. “But that can only happen if we do it right, and anything else is unacceptable.”

“I expect that this unacceptable incident and its aftermath is going to ensure that this never happens again,” Cyr added, “that there are extra protocols and inspections and other activities conducted to ensure the integrity of turbines and blades, and in the event that an incident does occur—and things do happen—that their response lives up to being a good neighbor to Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod.”