On Vineyard Wind's Blade Failure

To the editor: During my college summers, I lived on Nantucket island and loved the pristine ocean beaches. An event occurred in December 1976 when the oil tanker Argo Merchant ran aground on the sandy Nantucket Shoals spilling some five million gallons of heavy oil into the water. This event was the reason I started a solar energy company a few months later to provide homeowners a way to heat their domestic hot water without using fossil fuels.

The fast-growing solar thermal industry collapsed in 1986 after President Ronald Reagan suddenly eliminated the Solar Tax Credit Program that President Jimmie Carter started in 1977. There was no solar energy industry in America again until the late 1990s when the Electric Deregulation Act restarted the solar industry, providing incentives for renewable energy projects. The photovoltaic industry experienced explosive growth starting around 2003 and is continuing its rapid growth today.

The wind industry also went through explosive growth and the company I founded installed the wind turbine at the Nantucket High School in 2010. I was as upset as anyone when I saw the news that a blade broke off one of the wind turbines at the nearby Vineyard Sound project sending debris to beaches on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

This appears to be a “manufacturing deviation”. Let’s be honest, all methods of generating electricity have negative environmental impacts and the best way to minimize this is to use less energy. My experience after spending over 30 years promoting wind and solar energy is that those who speak up the loudest against wind and solar energy are those who have the largest carbon footprint. 

Of all people who should be supporting renewable energy, the most are those who live on Nantucket. The impacts caused by the burning of fossil fuels will not only cause increased sea level rise, stronger hurricanes, and a recent story by Angela Dewan and Angela Fritz at CNN that was updated August 3, 2024 states “the latest research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC- could be on course for collapse, weakened by warmer ocean temperatures and disrupted saltiness caused by human-induced climate change. But the new research which is being peer-reviewed estimates when it could collapse, suggesting a shutdown could happen between 2037 and 2064.”

A collapse of the AMOC would have catastrophic impacts on Nantucket as well as the rest of the world and we need to use all the tools in the toolbox including, solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear to quickly phase out the burning of fossil fuels. The most important thing we can do is not only to reduce our individual use of fossil fuels but to vote into office those politicians who understand the science of climate change and will help lead the efforts to phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Bob Chew