“The Biden Administration’s offshore wind ambition, not only Vineyard Wind, is going the way of the EV debacle. It is time to end the charade, even before the Presidential election.”
All the current political news is keeping this week’s implosion of the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry off the front pages. “Vineyard Wind shut down after turbine failure sends ‘sharp fiberglass shards’ onto Nantucket beaches,” reported CBS News out of Boston. The worst case event could spell the end of another Biden anti-economic, anti-ecology “climate” program, with only the 132 MW South Fork Wind project off the coast of Long Island under construction.
Vineyard Wind, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, was at the 10-turbine, 136 MW mark of a planned 62 turbines totaling 806 MW. GE Wind (formerly Enron Wind), the blade-maker, is in trouble too.
Reported Newport Buzz:
Operations at Vineyard Wind have come to a screeching halt after a catastrophic incident over the weekend scattered wind blade debris across Nantucket Sound and shut down Nantucket beaches, federal safety officials announced Tuesday. They stated that work at Vineyard Wind is “shut down until further notice.”….
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) reported a “turbine blade failure incident” at the Vineyard Wind 1 site on Saturday, a revelation that Vineyard Wind reluctantly disclosed Monday afternoon.
“There were no injuries reported, but operations are shut down until further notice,” a BSEE spokesperson stated. “BSEE is coordinating with the United States Coast Guard and state officials to ensure comprehensive information sharing. A team of BSEE experts is onsite to work closely with Vineyard Wind on an exhaustive analysis of the incident and the necessary next steps.”
In a move to mitigate the fallout, the company and the U.S. Coast Guard have established a 500-meter safety zone around the compromised turbine, situated approximately 15 miles south of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.
It was a worst-case event impacting tourism and beachgoers.
Nantucket’s harbormaster reacted swiftly, closing the island’s southern beaches to swimming on Tuesday morning. The harbormaster’s office warned via social media about “large floating debris and sharp fiberglass shards,” urging beachgoers, “You can walk on the beaches, but we strongly recommend wearing footwear due to sharp, fiberglass shards and debris.”
The repercussions of the failure were starkly visible as pieces of fiberglass and foam from the broken blade littered Nantucket’s south shore beaches. Each blade at the wind farm stretches roughly 350 feet from tip to turbine, underscoring the scale of the debris spread.
Conclusion
The Biden Administration’s offshore wind ambition, not only Vineyard Wind, is going the way of the EV debacle. With only one other project in construction, the offshore 30,000 MW goal by 2030 is in shambles. Yet the U.S. Department of Energy claims, “The U.S. offshore wind industry is currently in its infancy, but based on all this progress, a sizable growth spurt is just beyond the horizon.”
Vineyard Wind should have never happened. Ever since it was proposed in 2018, the government-enabled project has encountered environmental opposition in addition to ratepayer concerns. Other offshore wind projects are radically uneconomic (including from the ‘wake effect‘); environmentally intrusive (pile driving, avian mortality) and are open targets for weather-related destruction. It is time to end the charade, even before the Presidential election.
If we’re lucky, some of the dangerous fiberglass shards will wash ashore on a certain beachfront property on Martha’s Vineyard.
Such an event would qualify as “poetic justice.”
Here is a more in-depth look at the failure by Charles Rotter at WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/17/vineyard-wind-turbine-failure-incident-details-regulatory-response-and-industry-implications/
Just in case NPR, the WaPo, the AP and Pravda don’t report it:
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/breaking-wind