Nantucket Residents Now Want to Freeze Offshore Wind Farms following Vineyard Wind Blade Failure
Despite the concerns about wind farm realities after this incident, Vineyard Wind got the thumbs-up from the federal government to resume construction on this project.
I am continuing to keep an eye on the Vineyard Farms offshore blade failure near Nantucket. A few weeks ago the facility was closed because of the failure of Vineyard Wind’s newly installed wind turbines, and the city was poised to sue.
After one blade failed and ended up in the water, the beaches were cluttered with sharp fiberglass shards, which is a sub-optimum condition at the height of the summer tourist season. Continuing investigation into the cause of this environmental contamination incident determined that a manufacturing flaw in the blade was responsible for the failure.
Now there are reports that the blade debris has been observed by a local surfer on South Shore Beach in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Mike Kinnane claims that he found a similar piece of debris in Little Compton.
“What I found this morning, to me feels like a message to us here in Rhode Island to wake up and start standing together,” said Mike Kinnane. “This piece of foam that I found it traveled against the prevailing winds in the summertime and reached our shores.”
As Nantucket, the Cape, & the shores of Rhode Island continue to have broken blade debris at Vineyard Wind turbine wash up on the shore, and in the water, writer wonders, “Where are the environmentalists – agencies – writers?” https://t.co/BkhPIElZjZ #VineyardWind #turbines
— RINewsToday (@RINewsToday) August 16, 2024
A group of Nantucket residents is calling for an end to on all offshore wind development, and might be taking their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The call from ACK4Whales, a nonpartisan community group, comes as debris continues to wash ashore on Nantucket, and the “small, popcorn-sized pieces of foam” and fiberglass shards spread to Martha’s Vineyard, Falmouth and elsewhere.
ACK4Whales is also preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal on its lawsuit that looks to block the Vineyard Wind project.
A federal judge in April rejected the group’s arguments that the federal agencies that permitted the 62-turbine, 806-megawatt wind farm violated the Endangered Species Act, with construction threatening to “decimate” the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
ACK4Whales has also argued that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management – the federal agency responsible for leasing offshore wind energy projects – relied on a “flawed analysis from the National Marine Fisheries Service, violating the National Environmental Policy Act.
Beege Welborne of Hot Air uses the “Wayback Machine” to show how supportive Nantucket was of this wind monstrosity before the blade failure and assesses the new regrets.
Folks who live in, say, Rhode Island, as the author above does, are watching as the Vineyard Wind single-blade catastrophe slowly unfolds, looking back at what’s on the drawing board for their own proposed offshore wind projects, and saying, “Oh, HA-YULL, no!”
He also notes that Nantucket was all in, baby…until they weren’t, thanks to the rudest of reality checks. Nantucket had been sold a bill of goods from the get-go. But it’s too late once the pylons start going in. The blade shattering was the icing on the BS cake.
It’s funny how the viewpoints shift when there is hard data and a freshly opened set of eyes.
As Beege notes in her sharp analysis, this was only one blade. What happens when that farm gets slammed by a Nor’easter or a hurricane that decides to trek up the East Coast (as has been known to happen)?
A storm hitting any of the large wind farms will result in a man-caused environmental disaster – this time, a real one.
Despite the concerns about wind farm realities after this incident, Vineyard Wind got the thumbs-up from the federal government to resume construction on this project.
A press release issued at 7 a.m. Tuesday morning said the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement had given the developers of the wind farm permission to resume the installation of towers and nacelles (which sit atop the tower and convert wind energy into electricity), but a suspension remains in effect for turbine blades and power generation.
Vineyard Wind is a 62-turbine project and only 24 had been completed at the time of the accident. Work is resuming on the remaining 38 turbines but blades cannot be installed nor power produced under the terms of the revised suspension order. Of the 24 completed turbines, 11 were generating electricity at the time of the incident and 13, including the one that broke, were undergoing testing.
In a joint press release, Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the wind turbines, said a barge departed the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal Tuesday morning for the wind farm carrying turbine components, including several tower sections and one nacelle.
“The vessel will also carry a rack of three blades solely for the purpose of ensuring safe and balanced composition for the transport,” the press release said, adding that the blades will not be installed and will be returned to New Bedford later in the week.
Clearly, it doesn’t matter when the concerned citizens want – the green-grifting bureaucrats know best.
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Comments
welll lets open up some more crs -talll and celebrate
And don’t forget that “retired” blades have no recycling option, and the fiberglass NEVER breaks down.
And old solar panels and used lithium batteries.
The greenies are creating more problems than they solve, and do so with impunity in the Harris-Biden regime.
Well Fbg does break down – sorta. The resin holding the glass fibers together does eventually break down and free the fibers to disperse into the environment, often acting as a real irritant to people and animals.
The gel coat breaks down faster, often exposing very small bit of glass fiber which then penetrates skin and breaks off. That is one of many reasons that fiberglass insulation sucks.
I believe there are now 2 facilities for recycling blades. One in the US and one in Europe.
Even if the West achieved nut zero (without a total societal breakdown) the effective reduction in temperature will be miniscule. So why are we bothering to do any of this? It is a royal waste of money.
It is a transfer of taxpayer/ratepayer money to fund the vanity driven, virtue signaling pet ideas of wokiesta weirdos and into the pockets of the ‘green grifters’ who sell wholesale bunk. If an individual wants to install their solar/wind to supply energy at point of use …go for it but commercial grid scale wind/solar projects are not ready to supply uninterrupted electricity in the same way as coal, Nuke, hydro of NG electricity generation.
To re-emphasize what I said: wind and solar are royal wastes of money that will do almost nothing to alleviate a non-problem. Let me add further, they are a nefarious excuse to A: move the West to institute a communist economy; B: destroy the West.
No taxpayer or rate payer should have their $ taken and sunk into solar/wind projects that can’t provide electricity as reliably as cheaper alternatives of Nuke, NG, coal or hydro….which none of them can nor will be able to do for the foreseeable future.
That said I prefer to allow individual Citizens to make their own choices in how, for what, when and whether to spend their own hard earned money. If my neighbor wants to buy a hippopotamus to play in the moat he may build,… well….that’s his money and his choice. Same for his choice to install solar or wind b/c adult Citizens get to spend their $ or not as they wish and insisting they shouldn’t be able to do so seems kinda tyrannical. Gonna seek to ban dancing and rock music while you’re proposing bans on liberty?
I’ve always said heat your house with solar if you so choose, could make sense depending on where you live. Don’t expect to ever power steel mills that way.
Grid scale solo/wind is a boondoggle to funnel subsidies to the politically connected winners with a cut going back to the politicians who spent taxpayer/ratepayer $ in the form of campaign contributions and less subtlety board seats and/or consulting gigs for the politician’s friends and family.
Some person wants to become less dependent on the grid by installing point of use solar/wind? Pay out their own money to do so? Sure, go for it.
There’s plenty of NG elsewhere that could be shipped via pipeline but if the political and bureaucratic class put into power by voters in NE States refuse to permit expanded pipelines and instead shove wind and solar as the replacement for coal and Nuke electricity generation the winters may become unbearable. That’s leaving aside the lack of refinery builds in the NE for everything from jet fuel and fuel oil to gasoline and diesel. Gonna be hard to run airports without jet fuel or trains/trucks without diesel.
I have to admit that the prospect frigid winters without electric power in the Leftist North-East does not dismay me at all. And I note that even natural gas furnaces require electricity to function to heat a house.
Subotai Bahadur
Yeah, if this was some sudden calamity appearing out of the blue I would have a lot more empathy. The unfortunate reality is the majority of the voters in the NE voted for exactly what they’re gonna get; less reliable energy which is more expensive and very likely to be intermittent at the worst time. It is still avoidable but only if the folks humble themselves enough to admit they were wrong (if only within the privacy of the voting booth) and vote against the green grift and the wokiesta politicians who pushed it. I don’t believe a political majority in NE exists to do that. Maybe I’m wrong.
One thing for sure is anyone in those States pining their hope on Congress to fix their State Govt energy policy is whistling past the graveyard precisely because those of us in sane States ain’t gonna willingly allow Congress the power to do so b/c we fear giving the power to a future d/prog Congress to intervene and overrule our sane policies with Cray Cray lefty policy.
We have on demand wall mounted propane heaters in almost every room. Works just fine without electricity. You also save money by heating the room your in not the entire house.
While God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, politicians fleece their sheepish constituents.
if you think the wind blades, the solar panels and the lithium batteries will be a bear in the future – not a drop in the bucket compared to the “decommissioned” nuclear Navy ships… subs, cruisers and aircraft carriers…. congress doesn’t know what to do and can’t find contractors to disassemble them and has pushed “dealing with the problem” out 10 years…. they are docked… waiting.
Congress and the Navy know exactly what to do with them and can find contractors to do it. The problem is that spent fuel storage facilities have been blocked by states so until that is dealt with the ships will not be scraped.
Not in their back yard!
“…but a suspension remains in effect for turbine blades and power generation.”
So they can put up the towers and the gear housing and internals ready for power generation at some point when the locals move on to other issues. It’s highly unlikely that there will be any plans to tear down the towers and expensive generation gear once they are installed. It would be much easier to simply mount the blades they probably already have stacked up and ready to use.
It would have been much more effective to put the money to use building something like pebble bed nukes. But Congress didn’t give away our money to build nukes. I’d say “yet”, but how often do congresscritters stumble across a good idea and actually follow through?
They’re not worried about blade failures. They don’t want the things in their backyard, is all.
Soap and then duct tape gets fiberglass off your hands.
Let them live with their errors……
If Jawn Forbes Kerry has a shard attack, maybe something will happen, but MA is full speed ahead.
Interesting Cape May NJ cited this in shutting down their offshore wind project. No thinking person can justify these things, especially not in the ocean for chrissakes.
“He also notes that Nantucket was all in, baby…”
*****
Not totally true…When was in Nantucket many months before the recent events, I was surprised t0 see signs against wind turbines posted around the Island. I assumed it was another example of Progressive “Good for thee, not for me” or NIMBY
All these and other Green Energy plans do not work. Over time they have problems that cannot be fixed, they produce less power, cost more, and are more toxic.
It is not as though anybody ever asked them for permission in the first place.
These green disasters were NEVER intended to actually improve the lives of Americans by producing useable power or even reducing whatever skeery thing the greens talk about today; they are solely to line the pockets of the connected.
Billions in tax dollars, stripped from the productive class by parasite class propaganda about a non-existent problem and a pointless “solution”.
The true face of Socialism. No stopping it once you voted it in. Relentless. After all, it’s for your own good
Whales started washing up dead in numbers not seen before when they started this project.
Not to mention the shallower areas where these are going in are the lifeblood of marine life.
MA Gov told a group of residents peppering her with concerns about these and the “migrant”/crime issues they were confused by “misinformation”…unbridled condescending arrogance.