Workers have started cutting away part of the remaining portion of the turbine blade that broke one month ago today at the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm.
Cutting took place on Sunday and Monday, according to Vineyard Wind and blade manufacturer GE Vernova. The companies said the goal is to reduce the amount of material at risk of falling into the ocean.
After the initial break, pieces of the blade continued to fall. Chunks of fiberglass and foam, large and small, have washed ashore — first on Nantucket, and then on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod.
In an interview Monday, Nantucket Select Board Chair Brooke Mohr said the town wants to see changes to Vineyard Wind’s response protocols in case of a future incident.
The town is asking federal regulators to require faster retrieval of debris and direct communication with local communities, she said.
“We are lobbying hard with our federal delegation and the federal agencies to ensure that Nantucket gets to speak to that, because we took the brunt of this,” she said in an interview. “And we experienced the lack of communication. We experienced the lack of a response plan.”
If a better plan had been in place, “a lot of what washed ashore on Nantucket might never have gotten here,” she said.
In a statement today, the companies said the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has given them a green light to resume the installation of towers and nacelles. The agency updated its suspension order, which previously barred Vineyard Wind from conducting any installation or producing power.
The order continues to prohibit power generation and the installation of blades.
Early Sunday morning, another piece of the turbine blade fell, following controlled movement of the blade to achieve that goal, according to Nantucket officials.
The same day, Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova released slides of a plan to remove the final pieces of the wind farm’s broken turbine blade. They said they might conduct “controlled cutting” to remove more of the blade — which they later did — before removing the root, where the blade attaches to the hub.
Inspection of other blades is underway. The companies said a remote-control robotic camera called a “crawler” will be used to inspect the interior of the hollow blades.
Inspections will also include reviewing ultrasound images taken during manufacturing.
GE said it plans to use a new algorithm in sensors that are already in the blades to provide advance warning of a problem.
Meanwhile, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is considering what lessons it can learn for future permitting from the Vineyard Wind incident.
Last week, Zachary Jylkka, a planning coordinator with BOEM working to create lease areas for offshore wind off the Outer Cape, told the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates that the agency wants to improve the permitting process, so an incident like Vineyard Wind’s broken blade never happens again.
