Town Reaches New Agreement With Vineyard Wind, But Few Demands Were Met

After months of negotiations, the town of Nantucket on Thursday announced a 14-point deal with offshore wind developer Vineyard Wind, more than a year after the July 2024 blade failure. The deal mandates frequent communication from Vineyard Wind and greater town involvement in emergency planning, but does not provide the town with any financial compensation.

It also does not include any guarantees of mitigation should another of the wind farm’s turbine blades collapse and litter the island’s beaches with debris, as happened last year.

The agreement requires monthly updates from Vineyard Wind, gives the company seven days to respond to town questions, instructs the developer to share its response plans with the town and review - though not necessarily implement  -community feedback, and notify town officials of “any incident that triggers an emergency response” within three hours. The full memorandum of understanding is available to read here.

“I negotiated as strongly on behalf of my community as was possible in the scenario,” Select Board member Brooke Mohr, who led the negotiations for the town, said. “I'm really proud of this agreement. I'm really excited about the ongoing relationship.”

The town previously made 15 demands of Vineyard Wind at a scathing press conference in July, but only one was ultimately met in full, and several key demands, including one that would have established criteria to suspend new projects in the event of another major failure, were excluded from the agreement entirely.

“If this is it after all those demands, I don't know why we would ever sign off on it,” ACK For Whales board member Amy DiSibio said. ACK For Whales has long lobbied against Vineyard Wind and the other offshore wind energy projects planned for the waters southwest of the island. “Once again, another terrible agreement for Nantucket.”

The agreement also excludes all demands with a price tag, including two that would have required Vineyard Wind to pay predetermined amounts of money to the town if it violated established protocols.

“It was a nonstarter for them,” Mohr said. “That was never going anywhere. That's all I can say. There was no way to impose it.”

Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, legal counsel to the town for offshore wind matters, said that the town eventually came to believe that those demands would have artificially capped the amount of money the town would receive if there were another emergency.

The town is trumpeting the agreement as a success.

“This agreement is not symbolic - it is operational,” Werkheiser said. “These are real-world measures that will meaningfully improve the community’s ability to protect the island.”

Speaking over the phone hours after the agreement was announced, Werkhesier claimed that the deal gave the town more than its negotiating team had initially demanded, despite the fact that the agreement does not meet several of the most notable demands.

The project's critics are unlikely to see the deal as a victory for Nantucket, as it allows Vineyard Wind to escape the aftermath of the blade failure without paying the town anything in mitigation.

“The fact that we're not getting a penny from them is outrageous,” DiSibio said.

Notably, the memo includes a clause requiring the town to give Vineyard Wind up to four days to review all of the town’s public communications regarding the offshore wind farm to “identify and correct errors.” If Vineyard Wind and the town disagree on the facts, the town must “identify the disagreement in the public communication.”

Mohr claimed that this clause was intended to apply solely to factual discrepancies and would not muzzle the town’s communications department.

“They do not control what we say at all,” she said. “They don't have veto authority on what we write.”

If Vineyard Wind breaks the terms of the deal, it is unclear how they will be enforced. In theory, Vineyard Wind was already bound to certain standards by the so-called Good Neighbor Agreement signed by the company and the town in August 2020, but the town previously alleged that the company didn’t honor those commitments after the blade failure.

The agreement lays out a three-step resolution process, which mandates a meeting between the parties and a neutral mediator. But it specifies that any determination made by the mediator will be non-binding, and does not explain what happens if the parties opt not to abide by the mediator’s determination.

If mediation fails, the town could sue, but the town has been threatening to sue Vineyard Wind over violations of the Good Neighbor Agreement for months and has not done so.

“They didn't abide by the Good Neighbor Agreement. What's the incentive for them to abide by this?” DiSibio said. “I don't think there's any weight.”

Werkheiser and Mohr say that the difference is that there are now concrete, enforceable standards laying out exactly what constitutes a violation. That could make a potential lawsuit easier.

“What we didn't have under the Good Neighbor Agreement is clear definitions we could rely on,” Mohr said.

While most of the specific communication demands the town made were only partially fulfilled, in part because of what Mohr described as “the regulatory environment,” the town insists that the concessions it did receive from Vineyard Wind on communication were robust and cover the spirit of what the town was initially asking for.

Werkheiser also emphasized a list of concessions from Vineyard Wind not listed in the town’s initial demands, including a promise to include a town representative in tabletop emergency response scenarios and a guarantee of a town representative being involved in the communications coordination team in the case of another emergency. The agreement also mandates Vineyard Wind to reimburse the town for expenses incurred in responding to an emergency.

The agreement is likely the only concession the town will secure from Vineyard Wind. The town previously reached a $10.5 million settlement with GE Vernova, the blade manufacturer, which largely protected Vineyard Wind from financial liability relating to the blade failure, despite town officials’ repeated assertions that the wind farm developer was not party to the settlement.

For months after the settlement, the town met with Vineyard Wind behind closed doors, hashing out an agreement. According to the town, a “preliminary consensus” was reached in late August, but negotiations stretched on for more than three months after the parties reached consensus with no further updates made to the public.

The negotiations were led by Mohr and Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Moller.

Vineyard Wind has remained largely unaffected by a barrage of executive actions against offshore wind taken by President Donald Trump’s administration.

A list of the town’s initial 15 demands and whether they were met in the new agreement: