Did you know — 01
A turbine blade broke apart and closed Nantucket’s beaches at the height of summer
On July 13, 2024, a blade on a Vineyard Wind turbine failed and disintegrated
into the Atlantic. Fiberglass and foam debris washed onto Nantucket beaches during peak tourist
season. The town closed beaches. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement
ordered the project to stop producing power until it could be determined whether other turbines
were affected.
The manufacturer, GE Vernova, attributed the failure to a “manufacturing
deviation” — insufficient bonding that, in the company’s own words,
its quality assurance program should have caught. It re-inspected all 150 offshore blades built
at its Gaspé, Canada plant.
On July 11, 2025, GE Vernova agreed to a $10.5 million
settlement with the Town of Nantucket to compensate the town and local businesses.
Nantucket officials refused to include Vineyard Wind as a signatory, citing the
developer’s “lack of leadership, transparency, and stewardship.”
Nearly two years later, the investigation was still open.
Did you know — 02
NOAA’s own senior scientist warned that the harm to right whales cannot be mitigated
On May 13, 2022, Sean Hayes — Chief of the Protected Species Branch at
NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center — wrote to the Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management’s lead biologist about wind development south of Nantucket.
The waters at issue are the only known winter foraging area for the North
Atlantic right whale, of which only a few hundred remain. Hayes warned that turbine arrays would
alter oceanographic conditions and disrupt the dense zooplankton the whales feed on. He
recommended a conservation buffer of at least 20 kilometers from the Nantucket
Shoals edge of the development areas.
Disturbance to right whale foraging could have population-level effects on an
already endangered and stressed species.
— Sean Hayes, NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center, letter to BOEM, May 13, 2022
The critical detail is the one most often left out: vessel strikes and construction noise can
be reduced by scheduling and speed limits. The oceanographic changes cannot. By
Hayes’s account they persist for the full thirty-year operating life of
the turbines — and end only if the turbines are removed.
Did you know — 03
The blades cannot be recycled. They are buried.
Turbine blades are fiberglass bonded with thermoset resin. Thermosets
cross-link permanently when they cure. Unlike the thermoplastics in a recycling bin, they cannot
be melted and reformed — chemically, they do not melt, they burn.
The consequence is disposal by landfill. Recycling routes exist in laboratories and pilot
plants; at scale they remain economically unviable.
Peer-reviewed projections put global blade waste at roughly 43 million tonnes by
2050, up from about 789,000 tonnes in 2021 — with the United States accounting for
an estimated 2.2 million tonnes.
Did you know — 04
The switchgear is insulated with the most potent greenhouse gas the IPCC tracks
Sulfur hexafluoride — SF6 — insulates the high-voltage
switchgear that controls the current a turbine generates. It has a global warming potential of
roughly 23,500 times that of carbon dioxide and an atmospheric lifetime of about
3,200 years. It does not break down. It accumulates.
It was named one of the six main greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Roughly
80% of global SF6 use is in electricity transmission and distribution.
In fairness — and this matters: SF6 is not unique to wind.
It is in switchgear across the entire electrical grid, including the gas and nuclear plants wind
would displace. It sits in the switchgear, not in the turbine itself. The honest point is
narrower than the one usually made: expanding any generation fleet expands the
switchgear fleet, and that is a climate cost that never appears in a project’s
“emissions avoided” headline.
Did you know — 05
Every offshore turbine needs several tons of rare-earth magnets — mined somewhere you will never see
Offshore turbines overwhelmingly use permanent-magnet generators. About 76% of
offshore turbines use rare-earth magnets, which require neodymium and praseodymium for
strength and dysprosium and terbium to resist demagnetizing at temperature.
A large direct-drive offshore turbine can carry upwards of five tonnes of
magnets — on the order of 232 kg of neodymium-praseodymium per
megawatt of capacity.
That material has an origin. The Baotou region of Inner Mongolia is the center of world rare
earth production. Its tailings reservoir — in use since 1965 — covers roughly
12 square kilometres and receives about 8 million tonnes of tailings a
year. Processing generates acidic wastewater, fluorine and sulfur emissions, and
radioactive residue; published estimates run as high as 2,000 tonnes of waste per tonne
of rare earth produced. Scientists and local officials have raised the risk of the
containment dyke failing — it sits near both the city and the Yellow River.
A turbine spinning in clean air off Craigville does not make that tailings pond disappear. It
relocates it.