Lessons in incident response: Preventing an offshore wind crisis

Jack Dearing, MPP/MBA '26, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

by Jack Dearing, MPP/MBA ’26

This article was written in response to a class discussion in the EDGE Seminar class at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in Fall 2024. This article voices one student’s perspective and does not necessarily represent the views of Duke University.

On July 13, 2024, a turbine failure of the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm under development near Massachusetts prompted emergency beach closures on Nantucket and an immediately halted its further construction.[1] Fiberglass and other components from the broken blade soon began to wash onto Nantucket beaches. Within one week, shares in turbine manufacturer GE Vernova fell about 10.5 percent (though they have since rebounded substantially).

Incidents like Vineyard Wind’s turbine failure will inevitably occur again in the U.S. as the offshore wind industry continues to grow along the East Coast. While only one utility-scale wind farm has started operating in the U.S., several more are under construction from Virginia to Massachusetts. Even if every new blade installed in the future had no manufacturing flaws (the reason cited by GE Vernova for the Vineyard Wind failure and a similar incident in the U.K.), some projects will inevitably face similar damage due to hurricanes, tropical storms, and other similar events.[2] Projects in at least six BOEM lease areas in the New York Bight, which could support 5.6 GW of offshore wind capacity, would have faced a direct hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 if installed far earlier.[3]

The offshore wind industry already faces challenges due to rising costs and interest rates, which has led several project developers to cancel or postpone several projects. It has also faced mounting criticism or local opposition in some regions. Like other industries facing low-likelihood, high-impact risks, the offshore wind developers need to prepare for such events now both individually and collectively to mitigate their resulting financial and public image effects.

Contingency planning for isolated incidents

Offshore wind projects will likely face one of two scenarios related to turbine failures, damage, and resulting debris: isolated incidents, like the one at Vineyard Wind, and widespread ones, such as a damage from a particularly strong hurricane. However, individual companies need to develop specific, concrete, public contingency plans to address failures that will undoubtedly occur again. Even with these plans, developers need to be extremely transparent with impacted communities to mitigate the risk that a previously supportive community turns antagonistic after an isolated event.

Permitting for Vineyard Wind did require the company’s developers, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, to provide “detailed plans to guide its response to incidents.”[4] Accordingly, after the turbine broke, the developers quickly mobilized a debris recovery team to clean the area. However, since the incident, local reporting appears highly critical of the project and its developers, repeatedly asserting that the company has either provided inadequate answers on the cleanup timeline and nature of the hazard to Nantucket residents or simply avoided questions altogether.[5] Questions by residents also indicate that the community may have begun to connect the incident’s effects to other nearby projects, a particular concern for all offshore wind developers in the area given Nantucket’s prior history of stymieing offshore wind projects.[6]

Developers and turbine manufacturers therefore need to ensure the local community views the companies as responsible actors when considering such projects. At the least, locals should understand the risks and the actions undertaken to mitigate them, just as residents near nuclear facilities assume the low-chance, high-impact risk of living near such plants. Nuclear plant owners have well-established and public contingency planning procedures, including evacuation preparedness and coordination with state and local governments. Offshore wind developers should do the same.

Joint incident command for widespread events

Large-scale, systematic incidents like the damage a hurricane would create across an entire region will inevitably require a coordinated response. Such responses would fall short of any single developer’s internal capacity, or the larger incident may damage several projects owned by several companies. Federal responses to such incidents are necessary, but the offshore wind industry should also consider developing a similar coordinated response capability among different companies, particularly as such an incident would have a lasting reputational impact on the entire industry even if individual projects survived.

Responses to large oil spills generally occur under an incident command system (ICS) structure coordinated by the federal government as a National or Regional Response Team (NRT or RRT).[7] Rather than responding as multiple different entities, such as a federal response team in addition to both state, local, and company responses, one lead federal agency takes the helm to coordinate responses among all parties. This structure is even required by the National Contingency Plan (NCP) for oil spills and releases of other hazardous substances like chemicals or nuclear fallout.

The NCP today not may be sufficient to address large debris cleanups. Fiberglass as a marine pollutant likely falls under the NCP’s jurisdiction, though unlike an oil spill like Deepwater Horizon, the damage a hurricane could impose on an offshore wind region would be extremely dispersed. In Deepwater Horizon, oil pollution came from a single source that spread throughout the Gulf of Mexico. If a hurricane like Sandy hit the New York and New Jersey offshore wind area, fiberglass pollution could not only spread along the Mid-Atlantic coast but would also originate from potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of individual sources. Cleanup could become exponentially more challenging.

After the Vineyard Wind incident, Avangrid removed the entire damaged blade to prevent fiberglass from continuing to fall into the ocean and land on nearby beaches. If an extreme weather event were to cause massive turbine damage in the future, a collective response from federal, state, and company actors would be necessary to mitigate its impact. The offshore wind industry should begin to establish the capacity to coordinate responses to such incidents today before the risk a single storm could bring to the industry’s future tomorrow.

[1] Bruce Beaubouef, “Feds Shut down Vineyard Wind Project Following Turbine Blade Failure,” Offshore, July 21, 2024.

[2] Jason Graziadei, “GE Blames ‘Manufacturing Deviation’ For Vineyard Wind Turbine Blade…,” Nantucket Current, July 24, 2024.

[3] “New York Bight | Bureau of Ocean Energy Management,” Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, accessed September 29, 2024.

[4] “Vineyard Wind Statement on Offshore Incident,” Vineyard Wind, July 15, 2024.

[5] JohnCarl McGrady, “Vineyard Wind And GE Vernova Respond To Community Questions After…,” Nantucket Current, August 25, 2024.

[6] “Case Study: Cape Wind Project,” National Geographic, accessed September 29, 2024.

[7] “Incident Command System / Unified Command (ICS/UC) Technical Assistance Document” (National Response Team), accessed September 29, 2024.

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