A “manufacturing deviation” at a Gaspé, Quebec production facility caused the recent blade break at the Vineyard Wind energy project that sent pieces washing up on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, says GE Vernova’s CEO.
The event has proven damaging to the public perception of offshore wind energy, already a contentious energy source faced with opposition from wealthy coastal homeowners, the fossil fuel industry, and Donald Trump.
“Now we must all work to ensure that the failure of a single turbine blade does not adversely impact the emergence of offshore wind as a critical solution for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis,” wrote the U.S. Sierra Club in a statement, noting that compared to fossil fuels, “wind power is one of the safest forms of energy generation.”
The CEO’s statements about the manufacturing deviation were made at GE Vernova’s second quarter earnings conference call July 24.
“It’s been 11 days since the event, and just to reinforce from the start, we have no indications of an engineering design flaw,” CEO Scott Strazik said. “We have identified a material deviation or a manufacturing deviation in one of our factories that, through the inspection or quality assurance process, we should have identified. Because of that, we’re going to use our existing data and reinspect all of the blades we’ve made for offshore wind.”
On July 13, a blade broke on one of the turbines installed at the Vineyard Wind project, located 15 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Project operations were suspended by the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement as a result.
Widespread Attention
The aftermath also prompted an outcry from residents of the nearby Town of Nantucket—a summer destination for the wealthy, with an average annual income of US$100,000 to $140,000 and homes worth a median market value of US$3.36 million—as pieces of the blade washed ashore.
Concerns were raised about the presence of fibreglass particles in the water that might cause skin irritation, and about the possibility of PFAS “forever chemicals” being introduced to the environment. A later environmental impact report assured that “no PFAS-containing materials [are] used in the manufacture of the blade itself or in the foam, fibreglass, wood, or coating.”
The broken turbine blade and the hardships borne by Nantucketers have attracted widespread attention across media outlets. And as Grist noted, “addressing the problem and cleaning up the mess the accident created may be faster and easier than addressing the damage it may have done to public perception of wind.”
Though the event is being used by critics to denounce wind farms, advocates are pointing to the relative rarity of wind turbine accidents compared to those associated with fossil fuel production. So far, no injuries to people or wildlife have been reported in association with the turbine accident.
In a 2015 report, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office stated [pdf] that while no industry “assessment of catastrophic wind turbine failures” had yet been completed, “they are considered rare events with fewer than 40 incidents identified in the modern turbine fleet of more than 40,000 turbines installed in the United States as of 2014.”
In that same year, the U.S. Department of Transportation reported 113 accidents “impacting people or the environment” from fossil fuel and biofuel pipelines. A total of 72 such incidents were reported in 2023 alone.
And the U.S. Center for Biological Diversity published a map that showed 8,000 “significant” pipeline incidents in the U.S. between 1986 and 2013, producing more than 500 deaths, more than 2,300 injuries, and nearly US$7 billion in damage.
The Quebec Connection
The broken blade was sourced from a Gaspé, Quebec, manufacturing plant operated by LM Wind Power, a GE Vernova subsidiary with headquarters in Denmark that GE acquired in 2016. The company says it has produced 270,850 turbine blades since 1978, has seen its blades installed in one-fifth of the wind turbines worldwide, and has multiple other factories, including in the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia.
Before it delivered its first set of turbine blades to Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Lunderskov MØBELFABRIK had been a wooden furniture manufacturer that first opened its doors in Denmark in 1940.
The Gaspé facility has been operating since 2006 and was expanded in 2021, by which time it had already produced more than 10,000 turbine blades. The expansion was undertaken with C$25 million in support from the federal government and equipped the factory to produce LM Wind’s 107-metre-long Haliade-X turbine blades, like those used for the Vineyard Wind project.
GE Vernova has paused production at the facility while the company inspects the blades. According to Strazik, the blade broke because it “left the factory with insufficient bonding—the glue.”
Strazik said the factory has produced about 150 offshore blades, including most of the ones for the Vineyard Wind project. He stressed that the issue was not to do with the blade itself, and that a previous blade break at the Dogger Bank A project in the U.K. had a different root cause resulting from an installation error.
According to Reuters, none of the other four offshore wind projects currently under construction in the U.S. are planning to use GE Vernova turbines.
Having identified the cause of the break, GE Vernova is moving to reinspect the blades produced by the company—a large task, but of a kind that Strazik insisted “is work we know how to do.” He pointed to “non-destructive testing” that uses procedures like ultrasound to identify deviations. He declined to give a timeline for the process.
