Blown Apart: Massachusetts Offshore Wind Turbine Disintegrates Into the Ocean
Durability and economic realities continue to hamper state efforts pushing offshore wind
“I give up”- The blade at the Vineyard Wind Facility, physically.
States along the Eastern Seaboard have announced ambitious offshore wind targets to meet their self-imposed emissions reduction goals.
According to the Offshore Wind Market Report: 2023 Edition from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. offshore wind energy market “continues to be driven by state-level offshore wind procurement activities and policies. Seven states have durable statutory procurement mandates that total 42,730 MW by 2040.”
Among these states is Massachusetts. In 2022, former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed H. 5060, An Act Driving Clean Energy and Offshore Wind, which codified the Bay State’s goal of procuring 5,600 MW of offshore wind by June 30, 2027.
Blade Failure: What Happened
Offshore wind targets have already encountered stormy weather with surging equipment costs, local opposition, and canceled projects.
On July 13th, they encountered another setback when the Vineyard Wind project, a project off the coast of Massachusetts and the largest operating offshore wind facility in the United States, suffered a massive blade failure at the AW38 site while the turbine was undergoing testing as part of the commissioning process.
Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Moeller explained it in a meeting with the Nantucket Select Board, which may file litigation against the offshore wind development company, saying:
“One of the blades on one of the positions was broken and folded over, bended over, and was not pointing in the direction that it should,” [Moeller] said. “It’s an automatic system, so the system actually shuts it down, and that’s what happened here.”
According to Reuters, this isn’t the first time a blade built by GE Vernova “came apart,” noting a similar instance in the U.K.
The collapse of this blade sent thousands of pieces of fiberglass and foam core onto Nantucket’s south shore, closing swimming at beaches and prompting the Coast Guard to issue warnings for mariners in the area to be on the lookout for pieces of the blade. On July 18, the remainder of the damaged 300-foot turbine blade, the largest in the Western world, sunk to the ocean floor.
In reaction to the blade failure, the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) ordered the shutdown of the entire Vineyard Wind project and has ordered the company to halt further construction until it can be determined what caused the blade failure:
“Following the July 13, 2024, blade failure incident at Vineyard Wind, BSEE has issued a Suspension Order to Vineyard Wind to cease power production from all its wind turbine generators until it can be determined whether the blade failure affects any other VW turbines. The Suspension Order suspends power production on the lease area and suspends installation of new wind turbine generator construction: Those operations will remain shut down until the suspension is lifted. BSEE has also issued a Preservation Order to safeguard any evidence that may be relevant to determining the cause of the incident.”
Any type of power plant can experience mechanical breakdowns, and the failure of one blade on one turbine at the Vineyard Wind facility, which will eventually reach a nameplate capacity of 800 MW, does not doom the entire industry to failure.
That honor belongs to economics.
Offshore Wind: It’s Expensive
According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the cost of electricity from the Vineyard Wind project will be $98 per megawatt-hour (MWh), but due to rising material and financing costs, recent contracts signed for New York have put the cost even higher, at $150.15/MWh. It’s also important to remember that these figures include generous taxpayer handouts from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
Groups like the Sierra Club argue that using offshore wind will reduce electricity prices and act as a hedge against future natural gas price fluctuations, but the costs of offshore wind are higher than the cost of new natural gas combined cycle plants, even at the high fuel costs seen in New England in 2022.
The graph below shows the cost of the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) between the Seabrook nuclear plant and Green Mountain Power, the cost of new combined-cycle natural gas plants at the average gas cost in ISO-NE in 2023 —$3.04 per million British thermal units (MMBtu)—2022 gas prices—$9.32 per MMBtu—and the cost of the Vineyard Wind and New York offshore wind projects.
As you can see, the cost of the Vineyard Wind project exceeds the cost of new natural gas generation, even with elevated 2022 natural gas prices, and the cost of the wind project is nearly double the cost of a new natural gas plant based on 2023 natural gas prices.
The entire point of having a hedge is to minimize various risk exposures, which doesn’t work when states pushing offshore wind are locking themselves into long-term contracts with prices that are higher than the gas prices arising in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting global uncertainty in energy markets.
Adding insult to injury, the families and businesses in these states will still need to pay for the natural gas plants needed to generate power when the wind isn’t blowing, or if a turbine blade decides to break and disintegrate into the ocean. In the end, the idea that offshore wind will reduce energy costs is wishful thinking.
Conclusion
The incident with the blade at Vineyard Wind will be a momentary bump in the road for the offshore wind industry in the United States.
While this incident will likely add to concerns about offshore wind, particularly in communities like Nantucket that are impacted the most by their adoption, blue-state governors will almost certainly continue to champion offshore technology, and only time will tell if the economic and physical realities will eventually moderate their enthusiasm.
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ISO-NE 2050 Transmission Study More than you probably want to know about transmission in ISO-NE. Long story short, anticipated increases in home heating electrification will push ISO-NE to a winter-peaking system with 57 GW of peak load, up from 25.3 GW in 2023. The transmission will cost $23-$26 billion.
Offshore Wind Market Report: 2023 Edition Fifteen slides on offshore wind development in New England.
New England’s last coal plant is closing. What comes next? “Jim Andrews acknowledged that batteries will offer little assistance in New England during a deep freeze.”
The Offshore Wind Energy Scandal Is Even Worse Than You Think by
But the hard reality is that America’s offshore wind sector is a subsidy-dependent industry that is dominated by foreign companies who are in bed with some of America’s biggest climate NGOs, including the NRDC (gross receipts: $555 million) and Sierra Club (Gross receipts: $184 million).
Having been responsible for overseeing the budgets and construction of over 600 megawatts of utility scale wind in the lower 48, (1.5MW and 2.0MW WTG’s) it was always clear that while it was interesting to build them and a pain in the neck to operate them, they didn’t really work. Either the wind didn’t blow as the developers said it did, or it blew at night when no one wanted the energy. Lacking PTC and ITC and tax equity subsidies wind is a loser in terms of a megawatt generated and the costs associated with that megawatt, as the EBB’s have consistently pointed out, and demonstrate here again with their charts. The offshore units present exponentially many more operational challenges, and what is lost on the politicians when they say look at the success of offshore wind in say Northern Europe they fail to understand that the littoral regions there are completely different than the deeper water regions currently under consideration for offshore wind development here in the northeast of the USA.
The massive businesses built around the canard of wind energy being viable other than on an intermittent peaking basis and perhaps local load on a distributed generation basis are now so big they can’t fail. Until they fail. When they do fail and they will fail, the rate and tax payers will pick up the burden of decommissioning the mess they have wrought. Nantucket is in a pickle, the wealthy summer “residents” LOVE the wind, they can brag and virtue signal over soft cheese spread on water crackers whilst consuming expensive rose’ wine all summer long and into the fall on the upper east side of Manhattan, when they return from summers sojourn, what good little rich people they are, forget the G5 that flew them out there and back. But, the locals are affected, the economic damage from just a two to three day shut down of the south side beaches was eye popping enough, and ought to cause the locals to raise holy hell and sue the pants off of the developers and now the owner operators, and do so in a manner that it makes it uneconomical to continue, and set an example for others, such that it discourages further support and ends the fantasy of offshore wind. Make it economically and politically unpalatable and they won’t come.
Thanks for getting this out!
Wind turbines also create oil slicks and contaminate the ocean:
https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/wind-turbines-are-full-of-sh-and