Image from Vineyard Offshore Website
On Saturday, July 13th, an incident at Vineyard Wind 1, an offshore wind project located 12 miles off the coast of Nantucket, MA, added yet another blemish to the development of offshore wind in the United States.
While performing initial performance testing at the site of the 800 MW project, the blade of one of the GE Vernova turbines broke off near the root, releasing fiberglass and foam into the ocean, which has now begun to wash up on the shores of nearby Nantucket Island. The blades had been described as "the largest in the Western world" in statements made by Iberdrola, one of the developers involved in the joint venture. The scale of the failure has resulted in an environmental disaster, unprecedented for the involvement of a generally assumed “clean” technology.
To make matters even worse, the subsequent actions of Vineyard Wind representatives have been taken as disingenuous by the residents of Nantucket, with emotions coming to a boil in a contentious town hall meeting this past Wednesday. A comment from local charter captain Bobby DeCosta summed up the feeling of the island: "we've got a bunch of suits here trying to cover their tracks."
Aside from the growing environmental concern, residents have good reason to feel off-put by the actions of Vineyard Wind. One major complaint is that the town was not informed of the disaster until 48 hours after Vineyard Wind had discovered the issue. While the company has claimed that they followed the federally approved emergency action plan, notifying the town earlier than claimed, reporting by the Nantucket Current has not been able to uncover any evidence of this. Many residents had previously felt that they were kept in the dark about the deal that brought the turbines to their shores, which resulted in multiple lawsuits over the past few years to try to stop the project.
In yet another crucial misstep over the last week, representatives of Vineyard Wind, including CEO Klaus Skoust Moller, have continued to describe the debris as “non-toxic” in their press releases and public comments. Understandably, Nantucket residents have taken issue with this. Fiberglass may not fit the definition of ‘toxic’ when defined as “poisonous,” however, the splinters that have entered the ocean clearly fit the alternate definition of “harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.”
Finally, this is not the first problem that has arisen with the GE Vernova turbines installed at Vineyard Wind. This past May, in a similar situation, a blade at the Dogger Bank A wind farm off the coast of the UK “sustained damage,” halting installation efforts. A Reuter’s examination of recent events in the wind power industry found a string of failures across Germany and Sweden.
There are many questions that have been left unanswered by the executives of Vineyard Wind. Was a study of debris drift conducted prior to the commissioning of the project? Was there a structural issue with the blade that should have been caught before installation? How are blades of this size manufactured differently than smaller models? Are steps taken to handle the increased torque? Can the structural integrity of the blades be maintained over the 30-year life of the project? There is debris that will not wash up on shore; what is the plan to retrieve it? If the project is to continue, what do they change in their processes so that this does not happen again?
The cleanup efforts on Nantucket will continue over the coming weeks, but a pall will hang over all United States offshore wind efforts for the near future. In another headwind for the emerging industry, the outcomes of the Vineyard Wind failure will be one more reason for skeptics to oppose ongoing projects. And, if other developers perform crisis response in a similar manner to Vineyard Wind, they have good reason to.
The chaos of the last week has revealed that executing offshore wind development is not simply taking a project from on-land and placing it in a body of water. The magnitude of engineering challenges increases exponentially, making failures such as the one of this past week more likely. Without proper risk management, companies exploring offshore wind are doomed to fail, adding roadblocks to an industry already plagued by them.
Both supporters and opponents of offshore wind care for the environment. The question is the means of preserving the environment that exists today and how to walk back some of the damage that has occurred over the last decades of modern civilization, if that is even possible. Careless development is the enemy of both parties. Vineyard Wind may not have made missteps during the development of the project. To give the company the benefit of the doubt, the failure of the blade may have been unavoidable. However, due to the public sentiment surrounding the project prior to the failure, and the company’s subsequent handling of the fallout, they have set an industry struggling to gain a foothold in the U.S. back significantly. For that, they should draw the ire of all stakeholders in the future of offshore wind, supporters and opponents alike.
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