A manufacturing misstep is believed to have led to the failure of a wind turbine blade at the Vineyard Wind 1 project, and the environmental consultancy firm hired to conduct an initial analysis of the environmental impacts of the incident said the materials now washing ashore miles away are nontoxic but still present an injury risk to people.
A still undisclosed “incident” on July 13 damaged a 107-meter wind turbine blade being tested at the site of the first offshore wind installation to provide clean power to Massachusetts and the region, leading to extensive blade debris and subsequent cleanup efforts that are continuing more than 10 days later. The blade failure has set the project back and angered residents and local officials on Nantucket, where south-facing beaches had to be closed because they were littered with debris that Vineyard Wind said the public should not handle.
Last Thursday, a huge, damaged and dangling piece of the wind blade detached from the turbine and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean, adding an even greater amount of debris to the swirling currents.
The CEO of GE Vernova, the company selected by Vineyard Wind to manufacture the blades and turbines, said Wednesday morning that his company has “no indications of an engineering design flaw” that could have caused the blade failure, but instead thinks it was a result of an issue in the manufacturing process, specifically “insufficient bonding.”
“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 re-inspect all of the blades that we have made for offshore wind,” GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “And for context, at this factory in Gaspe, Canada where their material deviation existed, we’ve made about 150 blades. So that gives…