Nantucket Current | Another GE Haliade-X off the coast of England…

A wind turbine at the Dogger Bank wind farm off the coast of England suffered a blade break during commissioning on Thursday morning. It was the second blade breakage for GE Vernova's Haliade-X turbine on Dogger Bank, the same model that Vineyard Wind is installing in the waters southwest of Nantucket.

The Dogger Bank Wind Farm – set to become the world's largest offshore wind farm when completed – announced the incident on its website on Thursday evening, saying: “We are aware of a blade failure that occurred this morning on an installed turbine at the Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm, which is currently under construction. In accordance with safety regulations, the surrounding marine area has been closed and the relevant authorities have been notified. No one was injured or in the vicinity at the time of the damage. We are working closely with the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, who have launched an investigation into the cause of the incident.”

For GE Vernova, it was the third known blade failure on its Haliade-X turbine model in 2024, including the blade failure at Vineyard Wind on July 13 that sent thousands of pieces of fiberglass and Styrofoam flying onto the beaches of Nantucket and beyond.

Tim Brown, director of media relations for GE Vernova, notified the Town of Nantucket of the incident at 7:42 p.m. Thursday. Select Board Chair Brooke Mohr said the town would issue a statement on the incident Friday morning.

Brown declined to answer several questions from the Current – including where the blade was manufactured and whether operations at Dogger Bank would cease – and instead issued a company statement.

“On August 22, an isolated blade failure occurred on a turbine at the Dogger Bank wind farm during commissioning. There were no injuries and GE Vernova's Wind Fleet Performance Management team has initiated investigation protocols into the incident in coordination with our customer,” the statement said.

Vineyard Wind attributes the blade failure to a “manufacturing deviation” that occurred at LM Wind Power's factory in Gaspé, Canada, one of the two sites where the Haliade-X series blades are manufactured. LM Wind Power was acquired by GE Vernova in 2017 for $1.65 billion.

“Our investigation to date indicates that there was a manufacturing deviation in the affected blade,” said Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, during the company's second-quarter earnings call with investors last month, specifically citing “inadequate bonding” at the factory. “We have found no information indicating a design defect in the blade, or any information linking it to the blade incident we experienced at an offshore wind project in the UK, which was caused by an installation error at sea.”

Strazik also announced that GE Vernova will use the X-ray inspection records to re-inspect all 150 blades manufactured at LM Wind's facility in Canada, including those already installed on 24 turbines in Vineyard Wind's leased area.

But Strazik's revelations in the investor call about the LM Wind Power plant in Canada mean that both of the company's factories capable of producing blades for the Haliade-X wind turbines have run into trouble. At the other factory, in Cherbourg, France, an “operational incident” in April 2024 reduced production capacity and resulted in damage to one of the molds used to make components for the Haliade-X.

“No one was injured and we are taking appropriate measures to safely return the plant to operation,” a company spokesman said at the time.

More than a month after the blade breakage off Nantucket, Vineyard Wind remains suspended by the federal government. Although the investigation into the incident is ongoing, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) updated its suspension order for Vineyard Wind earlier this month, allowing the company to resume installing turbine towers and nacelles. The company remains prohibited from installing additional blades – all of which are currently being re-inspected – or producing electricity from the 24 turbines completed since last October.

At the Dogger Bank wind farm, the first GE Vernova Haliade-X turbine was installed in the fall of 2023 and began generating power on October 10. However, little is known about the first blade failure, which occurred just months later in May 2024. Dogger Bank's owners – SSE Renewables, Equinor and Vårgrønn – announced the damaged blade a week after the incident. In a statement, the companies said only that “a single blade of an installed turbine at the Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm was damaged. In accordance with safety procedures, the surrounding marine area was closed and the relevant authorities were notified.” They stressed that no one was injured, that GE Vernova had launched an investigation into the cause, and that initial findings indicated that the problem was limited to the single blade. Construction work, including turbine installation, resumed a week later.

The results of that investigation were never publicly disclosed, but after the Vineyard Wind blade failure, GE Vernova Scott Strazik told investors that the Dogger Bank wind farm incident was caused by an “installation error,” distinguishing it from the alleged manufacturing defects at Vineyard Wind. It is unclear whether the blades in the Dogger Bank wind farm incident came from LM Wind Power's factory in Canada or France.

The 13 MW GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine – which reaches a height of 260 metres at the blade tip, almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower – was first unveiled as a concept in 2018. A prototype was built onshore in the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where it operated for over three years.

In November 2019, GE delivered one of the rotor blades for the Haliade-X turbine to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's (MassCEC) Wind Technology Testing Center in Charlestown on Boston Harbor for “rigorous testing.”

The facility was the only place in North America that could test and certify wind turbine blades of this size, and it had just received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to upgrade its equipment, allowing it to perform structural testing on blades up to 393 feet long.

But the MassCEC facility, built in 2011, was not designed to accommodate blades the size GE wanted to mount on the Haliade-X turbine, so the test center had to “cut off part of the blade to fit inside the building,” according to a May 2022 CommonWealth Beacon report. “While blades can be tested without a tip, that's not ideal, and engineers must account for the adjusted weight.” According to Jennifer Daloisio, CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, offshore wind technology has evolved faster than expected. Despite this, the jumbo turbine model has been selected for a number of offshore wind projects around the world. In December 2020, Vineyard Wind announced that it had chosen GE's Haliade-X turbine for the project off Nantucket.