Approximately 15 miles south of Nantucket on Saturday, July 13, one of the blades on a non-operational wind turbine that Vineyard Wind was testing broke at its base, scattering debris into the ocean below as the blade folded over and dangled from its tower.
That night, Vineyard Wind established a 500-meter “security perimeter” around the turbine and notified the U.S. Coast Guard, the Dept. of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), and the emergency planning committees for Barnstable and Dukes counties, according to testimony by Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Møeller to the Nantucket Select Board on July 17.
According to the select board, however, residents didn’t learn of the broken blade until the evening of Monday, July 15, two days after the break.
On Tuesday morning, hunks of fiberglass and foam began washing up on Nantucket’s south-facing beaches. Photos of the debris flooded social media, as did comments criticizing the energy company. BSEE put construction at Vineyard Wind on pause while an investigation took place. Many Nantucket residents called for an end to the wind turbine project altogether.
A month has now passed since the event, and debris has continued to wash up on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, with a few pieces floating as far as Falmouth and Chatham.
While the physical cleanup of debris is underway, questions about the environmental effects on humans and wildlife have been hard to answer. It also remains unclear what caused the blade to break and how common such events may be.
The Cleanup
When foam began washing up on Nantucket on July 16, Vineyard Wind announced that it was sending two teams of four people to the island to remove debris.
“The debris consists of nontoxic fiberglass fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections, typically green or white in color,” the company said.
The company said it had already recovered three large fragments offshore, and that “any potential debris washing ashore will be pieces 1 square foot or less.”
Vineyard Wind did not respond to multiple inquiries from the Independent regarding how much debris has been recovered since then or the volume of foam and fiberglass still unaccounted for.
Nantucket Harbormaster Sheila Lucey closed several south-facing Nantucket beaches for the day on July 16. According to Nantucket Select Board chair Brooke Mohr, the closure was mostly aimed at preventing anyone from being hit by larger pieces of fiberglass in the surf, and Lucey reopened those beaches the following day.
An advisory to wear shoes on the beach and keep pets off the sand was issued and then removed, according to the Nantucket harbormaster’s office.
In the following days, Vineyard Wind deployed a fleet of boats to establish a perimeter and respond to reports of debris offshore. That has reduced the amount of debris coming ashore, Mohr said.
“There were a lot more large pieces at the beginning,” said Mohr. “They’ve done a much more thorough job of collecting the larger pieces before they have come to Nantucket’s beaches.”
No injuries caused by the blade debris have been reported, Mohr said, adding that the company should have notified islanders well before the evening of July 15.
The island was notified only “a few hours before fishermen were seeing stuff offshore,” Mohr said. Earlier notification could have helped the town coordinate a response and prevented much of what did come ashore from reaching the island, she said.
How Did It Break?
Eleven days after the 350-foot blade broke, Scott Strazik, CEO of turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, announced in an earnings call that a preliminary investigation into the breakage determined it was due to a “manufacturing deviation” at their factory in Gaspé, Quebec.
Strazik said the company had “no indications of an engineering design flaw” but that it plans to reinspect approximately 150 blades. It is unclear whether that number includes the blades currently installed on other turbines at Vineyard Wind.
In its Aug. 9 “Blade Incident Response and Action Plan Overview,” Vineyard Wind said it was conducting an in-depth investigation into the cause of the breakage, including reprocessing ultrasound images of each blade to verify bonding widths and using remote-controlled robotic “crawlers” to visually inspect the blades with cameras.
The company also said it was designing an algorithm that would use existing blade sensors to monitor blade health and better detect when turbines need to be shut down.
On Aug. 11 and 12, Vineyard Wind and maritime response company Resolve Marine performed a “controlled cutting” to remove the dangling remains of the broken blade, the company said. Next steps include removing the root of the blade from the rotating hub, removing fallen debris from the platform, and then “addressing seabed debris.”
The company did not announce a timeframe for that work.
A 2015 study of the breakage rate of wind turbine blades by a renewable energy underwriting firm estimated that, of the 700,000 blades that were spinning worldwide at that time, approximately 3,800 were failing every year, representing an annual failure rate of 0.5 percent, or 1 in 200.
Blade failures were the primary cause of insurance claims in the American on-shore wind industry at that time, according to Andrew Bellamy, founder of a renewables advisory company who was quoted in Windpower Monthly in May 2015.
The Independent could not identify a more recent analysis of wind turbine failure rates, but the 2015 data suggest that Vineyard Wind’s broken blade has plenty of precedent.
Another GE Vernova blade broke this year off the east coast of the United Kingdom at a wind farm on the Dogger Bank. That incident was deemed to be an installation error, however.
Roger Martella, head of government affairs at GE Vernova, told the Nantucket select board on July 17 that the breakage on Dogger Bank is “very likely disconnected” to the one at the Vineyard Wind turbine.
Gauging the Impact
At the July 17 select board meeting, concerns about damage to Nantucket’s environment were front and center. Several people compared the breakage to the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, while some worried it would destroy the island’s fishing industry altogether.
There is not much evidence yet of effects on that scale.
A preliminary environmental analysis by Arcadis U.S., an environmental consulting company hired by GE Vernova, said that “the blade materials and debris in their final product state are considered inert, non-soluble, stable, and nontoxic, akin to materials that can be found in textiles, boat construction and the aviation industry.”
A small amount of Teflon, which is a polyfluoroalkyl substance, or PFAS, is present in “aerodynamic add-ons” at the base of the blade, the company wrote, but there “are no PFAS containing materials” in the foam or fiberglass.
That report has been criticized, however, by University of California Davis professor of engineering Valeria La Saponara, who told WCAI that Arcadis’s report was rushed and misleading and that it ignored carcinogens other than PFAS, including those in PVC and polyester compounds.
Mohr said that she viewed the Arcadis report as preliminary and that she is “looking forward to much more detailed results.”
Microplastics and other microparticles are another potential avenue for environmental contamination from the broken blade.
According to Hauke Kite-Powell, a researcher at the Marine Policy Center of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, microplastics can physically clog the digestive systems of smaller organisms like zooplankton, while chemicals in plastic can accumulate in the tissues of larger predators and disrupt their physiology, especially their endocrine systems.
As debris from the blade disintegrates, microplastics will almost certainly result.
There are also other sources of microplastics in the water, Kite-Powell said, including derelict fishing gear, fiberglass boats, and wastewater from laundering synthetic clothing.
Kite-Powell told the Independent that he doesn’t know of research into the amount of microplastics already in the waters around the Cape and Islands, so it would be hard to say how much the blade breakage would increase the overall microplastic load here.
More research will be conducted, and information will surely emerge. But at present, as Kite-Powell said, “there’s an awful lot we don’t know yet.”
