Written by Associated Press’s LEAH WILLINGHAM
Boston (AP) After a wind turbine fell apart last year and its pieces washed up on beaches, officials in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Island accused the developer of the country’s first utility-scale offshore wind project on Tuesday of failing to answer their safety questions since Donald Trump’s victory.
The select board of Nantucket handed Vineyard Wind two weeks to address a set of obligations, one of which was that it adhere to the deadlines for alerting local authorities to emergencies. Although it remained unclear how such a policy would be implemented, the town stated that violations might result in fines of up to $250,000.
Board member Brooke Mohr claimed that Vineyard Wind’s lack of communication was due to the Trump administration’s mistrust of offshore wind projects.
The town said that private requests for modifications to its procedures have not been answered by Vineyard Wind, which is owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure and Denmark-based Avangrid Renewables in collaboration with Spain-based Iberdrola. If the town’s demands are not fulfilled, officials stated that litigation might be the next course of action.
During a virtual conference with news media, Mohr stated, “We think they are worried about the shift in federal policy and attracting attention from the new administration, which has ordered a review of offshore wind permitting practices.” But hiding isn’t the answer to their issues, and it’s not the answer to ours.
An Associated Press request for comment was not immediately answered by Vineyard Wind.
An important step in President Joe Biden’s ambitions to boost the United States’ reliance on offshore wind by 2030 was the administration’s approval of the project in May 2021, which is located approximately 14 miles (23 kilometers) off the adjacent island of Martha’s Vineyard.
When sections of a huge wind turbine blade at the Vineyard Wind project started to fall into the Atlantic Ocean in July, fiberglass fragments of the blade broke off Nantucket and began washing ashore last summer during the busiest travel season.
GE Vernova, which earlier this month agreed to pay $10.5 million to compensate island firms who lost money due to the blade failure, cited a manufacturing issue at one of its Canadian factories and claimed there was no proof of a design flaw. All factory-made blades were reinspected, and more factory-made blades were taken out of the Vineyard Wind facility.
Federal authorities lifted a suspension order on the project in the latter days of the Biden administration, pending the removal of all installed GE Vernova blades.
Town officials accused Vineyard Wind on Tuesday of breaking a five-year-old contract with Nantucket that calls for constant communication between the firm and the town during the whole project development and deployment process. Additionally, after the blade failure, it claimed Vineyard Wind had not gone far enough in lowering light pollution or involving the municipality in its emergency response preparations.
Citing Vineyard Wind’s lack of management, leadership, and transparency after the blade collapse, Nantucket officials declined to have the company sign the $10.5 million settlement.
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