As dependent as beach communities are on tourism, closing beaches in mid-July is unthinkable. It was a plot point in the movie “Jaws,” and that was over a menace that stayed in the water. What closed beaches this month in Massachusetts, however, didn’t just lurk in the waters but also came ashore.
Nevertheless, when a turbine in the Vineyard Wind offshore wind-energy facility experienced a sudden failure July 13, it spread fiberglass waste across the sea, which began washing ashore. Local officials warned about “floating debris and sharp fiberglass shards” and cautioned beachgoers not to go barefoot. The Nantucket Harbormaster had to close all southern-facing Nantucket beaches, including Pebble Beach, Miacomet Beach, Nobadeer Beach, Madequecham Beach, Tom Nevers Beach, Low Beach, and Sconset Beach.
Beaches were reopened after initial cleanup efforts, but officials’ warnings left no illusions about whether the danger had actually passed — they continued to urge people to “wear appropriate footwear while walking along beaches” and “leave their pets at home to ensure their safety.” Meanwhile, even though more than six truckloads’ worth of debris has been removed so far, fiberglass waste continues to turn up.
Normally, “appropriate footwear” for walking on a beach is none at all. Local marine and seaside animals, being naturally unable to heed official warnings, remained unprotected. The only animals that could be protected from the sharp fiberglass debris were the pets whose owners kept them away.
The cause of the turbine failure, described in Boston media as “an incident,” remains unknown. Still mostly under construction, the Vineyard Wind 1 project is the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind energy facility to begin operations. Only 10 of its proposed 62 turbines are operational. It took only one blade of those turbines, over 20 miles away from shore, to fail and cause all this trouble. The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has since halted operations at Vineyard Wind. According to Offshore magazine, broken turbines have happened in the UK earlier this year, and also in Germany and Sweden in recent years.
The incident ought to provide another sobering lesson for North Carolina policymakers. There are currently two humongous offshore wind projects planned off North Carolina beaches, and Gov. Roy Cooper and the Biden/Harris administration want many more. The Kitty Hawk project would feature 190 turbines, each one 1,042 feet tall — which would easily make them the tallest man-made structures in North Carolina (they’d be about 20% taller than the current tallest, the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, which is 871 feet tall). The Carolina Long Bay project would sit just 15 miles off the coast of Bald Head Island and Brunswick County beaches.
State policymakers have many reasons to protect the state’s electricity consumers, beach communities, coastal and oceanic ecologies, whales, military operations, and economy from offshore wind projects. The havoc wrought by just one broken blade adds to that list — especially considering North Carolina’s uniquely hurricane-prone waters:
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) uses a metric of “hurricane return periods,” which is a measure of how often a particular location is subject to a hurricane within 50 nautical miles …. [T]he waters off the coast of North Carolina are frequently revisited by hurricanes — more so than anywhere else in the nation except south Florida. North Carolina sees return periods of hurricanes at 5–7 years.
What that means is that, in a century, those areas off the coast of North Carolina identified by the NHC could expect to see 14–20 hurricanes.
It’s not as if the state is forced to turn to offshore wind as a last resort to produce emissions-free electricity. As the John Locke Foundation’s Center for Food, Power, and Life has demonstrated, the state can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 through a combination of nuclear power, hydrological power, and battery storage, using natural gas–fired generation to bridge the way between coal and nuclear.
Importantly, this approach would promote grid reliability and be significantly less expensive than adding unreliable, weather-dependent, on-again/off-again solar and wind facilities, especially offshore wind with all its many problems.