A wind turbine with a broken blade at Vineyard Wind 1, a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts. Accidents involving blades made by GE Vernova have delayed projects off the coasts of Massachusetts and England and could imperil climate goals. — ©2024 The New York Times Compan
THE collapse of a giant wind turbine blade off the Massachusetts coast in the United States confirmed Peter Kaizer’s worst fears about the dangers a new clean energy business could pose to fishermen like him.
Jagged pieces of fibreglass and other materials from the shattered blade drifted with the tide, forcing officials to close beaches on Nantucket and leaving Kaizer worried about the threat the fragments might pose to his vessel and other fishing boats, especially at night when the debris would be harder to avoid.
“All these small boats could be subject to damage,” Kaizer said. “Everyone wants this green legacy, but at the cost of what?”
The blade, which was more than 90m long, failed in July, but the repercussions are still unfolding at the US$4bil project that it came from – Vineyard Wind 1. Developers had hoped to finish the project this summer, making it the first large-scale wind farm completed in US waters, but now that goal will take a lot longer than expected.
The blade failure is the latest problem slowing the fledgling US offshore wind industry, which the Biden administration and states in the east coast are counting on to deliver emission-free energy to millions of people.
President Joe Biden and governors of those states had hoped to follow the examples of European countries like Britain and Denmark, which have plunked down thousands of wind turbines around the North Sea.
But the American offshore wind business has struggled to get going because of cost overruns, delays in issuing permits, and opposition from local residents and fishing groups.
Several large projects were cancelled or postponed even before the blade failure in Massachusetts because their costs increased sharply and developers did not anticipate supply chain problems and higher interest rates.
The failure of the blade, which was made by GE Vernova, has also raised concerns about safety and reliability.
In addition to the incident in Massachusetts, two GE Vernova blades broke this year at a wind farm called Dogger Bank, which is under construction off the coast of England. The company has said the incidents are unrelated but has provided few details about their causes.
Offshore wind turbines are essential to the east coast because states like Massachusetts and New York do not have ideal conditions for lots of large solar and wind farms on land.
Biden has said he wants 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in place by 2030, enough to meet the needs of 10 million households.
Fisherman Kaizer in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The collapse of a giant wind turbine blade confirmed Kaizer’s worst fears about the dangers a new clean energy business could pose to fishermen like him. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
The Vineyard Wind 1 farm is owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a Danish investment firm, and Avangrid, the US subsidiary of Iberdrola, a Spanish utility.
After suspending construction there, federal officials allowed the developers in August to restart installing some components like towers and nacelles, the compartments at the top. But they are still barred from installing blades or operating completed turbines, depriving the project of revenue from electricity sales.
The risk of such events and the greater scrutiny of offshore wind projects that is expected to follow will probably raise the already high cost of offshore wind farms relative to other forms of renewable energy, analysts said.
Those costs are typically borne by residents on their electricity bills and the federal and state governments that offer subsidies to wind and other renewable energy projects.
“I think there needs to be a bit of a reset in terms of how these offshore projects are thought about and the inherent risk in these projects,” said Andrew Kaplowitz, an analyst at Citigroup.
Much of the new scrutiny is likely to focus on the few companies that make wind turbines and their components, particularly GE Vernova, formerly the energy division of General Electric, the conglomerate that split itself into three companies this year.
In recent years, GE Vernova, which has long made wind turbines that are installed on land, joined a race to develop ever- larger offshore turbines.
Its entry in this competition was the Haliade-X, a monster machine that is taller than any building in Boston. This is the turbine that was involved in the Vineyard Wind and Dogger Bank incidents.
Developers wanted larger turbines to make projects more profitable by allowing them to generate more energy from each machine.
For a while, the strategy worked. In the run-up to construction, Vineyard Wind’s owners shifted from a machine made by Vestas, a Danish turbine maker, to the GE turbine because it was nearly 40% larger.
But some of the promised gains of larger turbines have not materialised.
The supply chain chaos caused by the pandemic raised the costs of many components, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up the price of energy.
GE Vernova’s offshore wind business is losing money, and its only secured orders are from two projects – Vineyard Wind and Dogger Bank.
In June, Scott Strazik, GE Vernova’s CEO, said these deals were “all in the red”, meaning the company was losing money on them.
The company insists that it has been hit with one-offs rather than systemic flaws.
Some groups that have long opposed offshore wind turbines have seized on the failures as a reason regulators should be more reluctant to approve the use of these machines.
Fishing industry organisations in particular complain that they have been told little about the cause of the accident off Nantucket and the dangers that blade fragments may pose to marine life and people.
Also, the beach closings, however brief, came as a shock to coastal communities, bringing home the potential downsides of living near a large energy project, even a renewable one.
Although wind and solar farms are important for reducing emissions, “they are, in order to be effective, industrial-scale activity,” said Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, an environmental group that has supported the development of offshore wind.
“And every industrial-scale activity has negatives associated with it.” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
