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.”
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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