|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sixty-two towers. Sixty-two nacelles. One-hundred eighty-six blades.
Those are the pieces that comprise Vineyard Wind, an 800-megawatt offshore wind project nearing completion after more than two years of construction.
By The Light’s accounting, the project has two towers and two nacelles left to ship out from the Port of New Bedford. That leaves the blades — an estimated 33 of which, as of last month, have yet to top some turbines, and an unknown number that may still need to be removed and replaced.
As batches of blades have traveled across the seas, to and from New Bedford, France, and Nova Scotia, and been installed on turbines, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has continued to investigate what caused one of the blades to fail in July 2024.
In January 2025, the Biden administration ordered Vineyard Wind to remove all blades manufactured at a factory in Gaspé, Quebec, where the broken blade was built. BSEE gave Vineyard Wind permission to finish construction using blades from a different factory in Cherbourg, France.
But The Light has found that two blades manufactured at the French plant were also removed, according to satellite images.
Perhaps the most consequential question on people’s minds still remains: how many blades had the same critical flaw that caused the blade on turbine AW38 to catastrophically collapse into the ocean in 2024?
Since BSEE allowed construction to resume, little has been shared publicly about the blade failure beyond what the blade manufacturer, GE Vernova, said was the root issue. Last summer, the company said its preliminary review determined the failure resulted from a manufacturing defect — “insufficient bonding” — at its Canadian factory.
Because BSEE’s investigation into the blade failure isn’t over, no independent authority has confirmed these accounts of why the blade was defective, or why blades made at the French factory were also removed.
The Town of Nantucket’s attorney, Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, told The Light last month that “it’s taken far too long” to get a final report on the blade failure.
Nantucket’s beaches closed in the aftermath of the failure, with fiberglass and foam debris washing up on island shores. As a result, BSEE also ordered Vineyard Wind to conduct an environmental review of impacts. The town put a list of demands before Vineyard Wind this summer, which are still being negotiated. GE Vernova agreed to pay $10.5 million for harm incurred by Nantucket businesses.
“It is one of several causes for the town having made the demands for greater accountability,” Werkheiser said.
Blades made at another factory also removed
GE Vernova said the blade failed due to insufficient bonding that should have been detected through quality control and inspection procedures.
A re-examination of manufacturing data identified “additional blades with insufficient bonding,” according to a December 2024 document from Vineyard Wind. The document did not say how many more blades were affected.
The blade failure resulted in layoffs and suspensions at the blade manufacturing plant in Gaspé. Local outlet Radio Gaspésie, citing anonymous sources, last year reported that executives at the plant may have asked employees to falsify quality control data, favoring production quantity over quality. Reuters reported that “corners were cut.”
(A spokesperson for the wind power workers’ national union, the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, which last year contested the suspensions, said the union’s president declined comment.)
Vineyard Wind noted in its December 2024 revised construction plan that Canadian-made blades on 22 turbines (so as many as 66 blades) needed to be removed. It also identified two additional turbines, AT-41 and AS-42, where blades made at “a different manufacturing plant,” not the Canadian one, might also require removal. A separate document from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management identified those blades as manufactured in Cherbourg.
Last year, satellite images showed both turbines with blades popping against the dark sea surface. As of October 2025, both stood without blades.
The Haliade-X 13-megawatt blade last year was being manufactured in Gaspé and Cherbourg. Since the failure, new blades have been coming in from France.
An Interior Department spokesperson told The Light in November that BSEE did not order the removal of the blades at the two turbine sites, writing, “that decision was made by the lessee.”
“Questions about blade manufacturing should be directed to GE. BSEE cannot comment further while the investigation is ongoing,” the Interior spokesperson said.
The fate of the scrapped Canadian — and French — blades remains unclear. At least some of them have been sent to Cherbourg, according to vessel tracking websites and observations that a French photographer conducted for The Light in October 2024.
A GE Vernova spokesperson did not answer emailed questions, stating the company had no further details to share. Vineyard Wind declined to comment or answer questions.
Blade repairs in Nova Scotia
This year, turbine technicians inspected and repaired blades in the Port of Sydney in Nova Scotia, then loaded them onto Wind Pace, a specialized vessel Vineyard Wind is contracting, and sent them off for installation, according to posts on LinkedIn.
One image shows a technician tending to the blade’s edge, which looks like it had its white paint sanded off. Another picture appears to show a patchwork of white paint swatches on a blade.
Another image posted a few months ago shows blades being loaded in Nova Scotia onto a heavy lift vessel that frequents the Port of New Bedford. A turbine blade repair technician, who posted the image, wrote that he and his coworkers shipped “6 units” of the 107-meter blade from the Port of Sydney to New Bedford.
It’s unclear why blades in Nova Scotia required repair, but the reason may not have anything to do with the July 2024 blade failure.
Blades can receive damage during handling and transport. Once they’re manufactured, they get hoisted onto a vessel, shipped across the ocean, offloaded, stacked at the staging terminal, loaded onto a barge, and then finally lifted by a crane for installation into the nacelle.
Outside of manufacturing, transport and installation, causes of failure include turbulent winds, out-of-control rotation, and lightning strikes.
Damage can be more cosmetic or superficial, like cracking on the surface, or more critical, like a bonding issue. Sometimes, the incurred flaw doesn’t affect the functionality, but can decrease performance.
Last year, GE Vernova saw the same Haliade-X model fail at another wind farm, Dogger Bank in the United Kingdom. There, the company cited an installation error.
DNV, an international certifier of blade design, in a 2023 paper said the scale of blade issues has grown as blades have become larger, and that it “perceives blade durability as a major challenge the wind industry must address,” The Light previously reported.
Vineyard Wind must submit reports to BSEE that assure compliance with quality control and inspections, under an amended agreement with the federal government in January following the blade break. Inspection reports before each blade is installed must include pictures, ultrasound scans, and notes on any repairs made after the blade was manufactured or transported to the marshalling port.
The project is also required to submit to BSEE post-installation inspection reports for the blades. It has to conduct external inspections via drone or a person with rope access within six months of a blade being installed.
From oil rig investigations to offshore wind blades
The investigation into GE Vernova’s blades is one of BSEE’s first major renewable energy investigations — and a high-profile one at that. For decades, the agency’s bread and butter has been enforcing safety and environmental rules at oil and gas platforms. (Before being established as BSEE in 2011, the office went by a different name as part of the Minerals Management Service.)
The agency’s online database documents hundreds of incidents at offshore fossil-fuel sites: polluting spills, explosions, fatalities, collisions, fires, injuries, and evacuations. A separate database also tracks incidents of noncompliance for these offshore sites.
BSEE lists two types of investigations: panel and district. A panel investigation is more in-depth and comprehensive than a district one, and may involve experts from other agencies. BSEE did not answer questions on which category the Vineyard Wind blade failure investigation falls into.
A former BSEE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there shouldn’t be a “huge gap” or “learning curve” for BSEE to undertake renewable energy investigations in the Atlantic: “That’s what the national investigation program is for.”
They also noted that investigators of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon Spill took less time — one year — to issue a report.
BSEE declined an interview request in September, citing the ongoing investigation.
“Given the current status of the investigation, we do not have personnel available to discuss it at this time,” said spokesperson Mike O’Berry in a September email. The agency did not answer emailed questions in November about the status of the investigation, and the removal of blades made at a different plant, deferring to the Interior’s response.
Email Anastasia E. Lennon at alennon@newbedfordlight.org.
Excellent reporting by Ms. Lennon. BSEE and these companies must be held accountable. Keep the pressure on them until the truth is revealed. Thank you for shining a light on it!
Many early wind turbine blades were made of super light-weight / super-strong carbon fiber material which is quite expensive. The massive size of these new OSW turbine blades makes carbon fiber construction prohibitively expensive so they have gone to a more traditional fiberglass and foam “sandwich” construction. This is much heavier compared to carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is still used at high stress points but in much smaller quantities. The problem with this method is that a greater amount of material is needed in the construction just to make the blade strong enough to support it’s own immense weight. If bonding of the components isn’t done properly during construction the strength required to function without failure is severely compromised so more failures are imminent if building standards are not closely adhered to.
I would think that wind farms must be fairly secure. Out in the ocean with vessels moving three hundred sixty degrees about. Out of all potential causes for blade failure, one is missing. The wind projects have been getting a lot of emotional resistance. What about vandalism?
I appreciate this reporting and find it difficult to find information about the wind farm in other outlets.
That being said, it feels like this newspaper has two issues that it focuses on Wind and Immigration. The rest of the important issues facing the South Coast be damned. Also, very little skepticism of the train project and no coverage on my property taxes tripling over the last ten years or less.
Capital locked in to a technology that depends on the wind not just blowing but blowing sufficiently hard to produce power to begin paying back the investment. So dead money how much of the time?
Meanwhile, like most things, money was borrowed to build it and the interest clock doesn’t ever stop ticking.
The only way to make this scheme pay is to raise electric rates. Force the hapless consumer to break themselves like in an armed robbery to pay more for power or go without.
Huddled masses yearning to be air conditioned or heated subject to the weather and the utility Gods jamming the most expensive form of power in their wallets.