The spectacular breakup of a wind turbine off the coast of New England is highlighting a huge risk embedded in New York State’s strategy for achieving its green energy “Net Zero” targets.

As reported in the Nantucket Current:

When Vineyard Wind completed the installation of the first GE Vernova Haliade-X 13-megawatt wind turbine in the waters southwest of Nantucket in October 2023, the company trumpeted it as “the largest turbine in the western world.” It was supposed to be one of the 62 turbines that would make up the first large-scale, commercial offshore wind farm in the United States.

But just nine months later, the project has been suspended by the federal government after the now infamous turbine blade failure on July 13th that left Nantucket’s beaches and the waters surrounding the island littered with fiberglass and styrofoam debris that is still being recovered.

Four days later—as if oblivious to the national headlines already generated by the Vineyard incident—Governor Hochul proudly announced the start of construction on Sunrise Wind, an offshore project even larger than Vineyard. Sunrise will be developed by Ørsted A/S, a Danish multinational energy company.

Situated 30 miles east of Montauk, Sunrise will feature up to 122 turbines generating 924 megawatts, which also would make it fully 10 times the size of New York’s first and so far only fully operational offshore wind generating project, the 130 megawatt, 12-turbine South Fork Wind Turbine, which is a few miles east of the Sunrise Wind site.

Authorized by public utility regulators in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the failed Vineyard Wind turbine was enormous, with a rotor diameter of 720 feet—roughly 2.4 times the length of a football field—and a peak vertical height of 814 feet, taller than the Eiffel Tower. This massive size, the Current noted, “is novel for the offshore wind industry.” Aside from Vineyard Wind, similarly huge turbines have been installed at only one other location in the world—the Dogger Bank Wind Farm off the northeast coast of England, which also reportedly suffered unspecified blade damage recently. Both sites used Haliade-X turbine blades manufactured by GE Vernova, which are supposed to have at least a 25-year lifespan.

New York’s Sunrise project will include turbines much larger than those at the Vineyard installation, ranging in height up to 968 feet with rotor spans up to 787 feet, according to a project design filed with the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.  Still heading towards the start of construction off the shores of Long Island is a second megaproject, Empire Wind 1, which would consist of 60-80 turbines generating 810 megawatts.

There’s no indication that Hochul—much less the numerous other politicians, environmental activists, and labor union leaders quoted in her celebratory press release—has considered the question posed by the headline and photo in the Nantucket Current:

As noted, the failure of the Vineyard project was caused by the shattering of a Haliade-X blade on a GE Vernova-manufactured turbine.  The preferred supplier of the turbines on the still-pending Empire Wind 1 project is identified in regulatory filings as Vestas, a Danish manufacturer, but the identity of the turbine supplier for New York’s Sunrise project is something of a mystery—hard to find anywhere in easily accessible online documents related to the project.

Even assuming the Sunrise supplier is a company other than GE Vernova, the scale of the project is such that, like Vineyard, it will push the envelope of turbine blade manufacturing technology to new extremes.

Like all such technology, offshore wind will provide only an intermittent source of electricity for which the energy plan has, to date, failed to provide dispatchable emission-free backup generating sources.

It’s one thing for the governor to admit that the state is already falling behind unrealistic “net zero” targets, including a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions within the next six years. It’s quite another to risk catastrophic failures that could litter beaches with foam and fiberglass debris that could pose “potential negative and adverse impact[s]” on the environment, marine life, and human health, as asserted in a statement by indigenous tribes inhabiting the areas affected by the Vineyard Wind failure.

Or to be killing whales, as found by some other recently reported research.

A much more detailed exploration of all the current issues surrounding New York’s offshore wind plans can be found at my Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blogsite.