A charter boat fisherman was among the first to discover the wreckage — a “mess,” he called it, deep off the coast of Massachusetts. From behind a veil of pea soup-thick fog emerged hundreds of white and green fiberglass and Styrofoam pieces, some as small as a fingernail, some as large as a truck hood. By the following morning, the tide had carried the debris about 12 nautical miles and scattered it across Nantucket Island’s beaches. Residents woke to a shoreline covered in trash, fiberglass shards mixed in with seaweed and shells, waves thrusting flotsam onto the sand.
It did not take long to follow the breadcrumb trail to its source: Vineyard Wind, an offshore wind farm located south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. On Saturday, July 13th, 2024, a nearly 115,000-pound blade broke from one of the turbines, shattered, and littered at least six truckloads’ worth of waste into the ocean.
The stakes for renewable energy advocates could not have been higher. Scientists, environmental groups, offshore wind developers, investors, and stakeholders from across the world had all been closely monitoring Vineyard Wind, which, with a planned 62 turbines, was on track to be the first large-scale commercial offshore wind farm in the United States. Dozens of other projects with contracts pending construction had hoped to glean insight from Vineyard Wind as a leading example. A disaster like this would put the nascent offshore wind industry under intense scrutiny and had the potential to throw future projects into jeopardy.
For Nantucketers, the timing of the break was devastating. Not only is mid-July peak tourism season on the island, that particular week was one of the hottest in recorded history. As the sun scorched Nantucket’s amber sands, fiberglass washed ashore, rendering the island’s southern beaches unsafe for use.
The harbormaster deployed lifeguards, most of whom are in their late teens and early twenties, to clear the refuse. They donned latex gloves and red uniform swimsuits to haul large fiberglass segments onto ATVs. Vineyard Wind sent its own crew for beach cleanup, and warned community members not to pick up the debris themselves. Locals ignored the advice. These were their beaches, after all, and the litter was overwhelming. Within days, a couple of young men had capitalized on the mounting frustration by selling T-shirts that read “Vineyard Wind is ISIS” on the town docks.
Nantucket’s Select Board, the island’s main governing body, called an emergency meeting with Vineyard Wind’s CEO Klaus Møller. The public was invited to a brown conference room located inside the police department, with the Select Board seated at a V-shaped table at the front. Møller arrived in a loose blazer, rectangular eyeglasses, and a white dress shirt. He is originally from Denmark; Vineyard Wind is owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables, a US subsidiary of the Spanish electric utility company Iberdrola. Danish accent aside, Møller resembled many of the local people sitting in the audience: white, scruffy beard, crew cut, middle-aged.
These similarities did not help him, however. While Møller expressed that Vineyard Wind was taking the issue seriously, it was clear he wanted to deescalate the community’s concerns. He described the blade debris as nontoxic, a characterization that unnerved the audience. People interrupted him in protest, some coughing loudly. Islanders wanted to know: If the material was nontoxic, why didn’t they want us touching it? Did the blade contain PFAS, the forever chemicals known to cause cancer? What about the squid, oysters, scallops, and mussels sucking up fiberglass shards in the ocean? A surf instructor lost a week of work during the busiest month of the year, when he, like most Nantucketers, earns a large portion of his annual income. Would he be compensated? At one point, a lobsterman wearing a Trump T-shirt approached Møller and accused him of not paying attention during audience questions. He was told to return to his seat.
Roger Martella, the chief corporate officer of GE Vernova — the subsidiary of General Electric that manufactures the turbines for Vineyard Wind — joined the meeting by Zoom from Cape Cod. Prior to joining GE, Martella was previously general counsel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He and a technical expert explained that the turbine blades are made out of the same material as boats: fiberglass, Styrofoam, balsa wood, and a binding agent. He reiterated Møller’s point that they were taking the issue seriously and said GE Vernova feels Nantucket is their “backyard,” since they are headquartered in Cambridge. Martella repeated multiple times that the company would conduct a root-cause analysis to investigate what went wrong with the blade.
During an earnings call a couple of weeks later, in late July, GE Vernova’s CEO reported the break was due to a manufacturing error and quality assurance processes had failed. Specifically, adhesives hadn’t been applied properly. Within months of the Vineyard Wind blade break, two other GE Vernova Haliade-X blades failed at the Dogger Bank wind farm between the United Kingdom and Denmark. Those incidents were unrelated to the manufacturing issue found in the Vineyard Wind blade. The first Dogger Bank blade failed in May, two months prior, because of an installation issue. The second failed a month later, in August, because it had remained stagnant prior to operation, making it vulnerable to strong winds and weather.
The fact that each break had been caused by separate factors and not one isolated issue indicated a much larger problem for GE. But the explanation stirred even more anxiety among Nantucketers. Any trust the community had in Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova had been fractured, and their faith in offshore wind as an industry was beginning to crumble with it — the science, the economics, the honesty of its executives. Doubts multiplied by the day. Some questioned how it was possible that the company had three separate blade failures that weren’t somehow connected. They wondered if GE Vernova was concealing operational issues that led to the accidents. Could a deeper conspiracy be afoot?
GE Vernova’s Haliade-X is among the largest and most powerful wind turbine blades in the world. A single operational turbine equipped with Haliade-X blades and rotor can save up to 52,000 metric tons of CO2 a year, the equivalent of saving emissions from about 11,000 vehicles annually. One spin of this towering whirligig produces enough electricity to power an average household for two days.
Though wind is one of the most cost-effective energy resources — along with solar — it has historically been unpredictable, as fickle as the breeze itself. To overcome the issue of calm weather days, GE spent hundreds of millions of dollars to be first to market with a blade that would generate more energy with fewer rotations.
For GE to achieve this, they were going to need a bigger blade. One Haliade-X is about the length of a football field. From ocean surface to blade tip, a Vineyard Wind turbine stands approximately 850 feet tall. By comparison, the Empire State Building is only a couple hundred feet taller. The blades are manufactured one half at a time length-wise: factory workers layer a composite of fiberglass and balsa wood inside a mold, vacuum seal the air out, then inject the mold with a resin to fuse the composite together. The two halves are then joined, sanded, buffed, and shipped out by freight boat to their wind farm destination.
The process for creating, testing, and commercializing the Haliade-X was astonishingly fast, especially considering its scale and complexity (though not compared to Chinese competitors, which are dominating the market). In 2019, GE Vernova completed a 12-megawatt prototype of the Haliade-X for testing. By 2023, it had received a full type certification for 12-, 13-, and 14.7-megawatt models, and the 13-megawatt blades were ready for commercial use in Vineyard Wind and Dogger Bank. One Haliade-X-equipped turbine generates nearly 30 times more electricity than the first offshore wind turbine installed off the coast of Denmark in 1991.
GE boasted that one turbine could produce as much thrust as a Boeing 747 jet — which, given Boeing’s own recent manufacturing disasters, may have been a prophetic comparison. In September 2024, GE Vernova announced it would be laying off 900 offshore wind employees — in part due to the accidents — to create “a smaller, leaner and more profitable business.”
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) shut down power supply from the wind farm to the grid and halted construction. Vineyard Wind would need to submit a revised construction and operations plan to restart the project. Meanwhile, GE Vernova would clear the remaining blade debris and analyze the environmental impact of the break. They used “crawler” drones to inspect each blade and took over 8,000 ultrasounds to assess the remaining blades’ safety and operational readiness.
On December 5th, 2024, Vineyard Wind submitted the revised plan to remove Haliade-X blades from 22 wind turbines. BSEE approved the plan about a month and a half later, in January 2025, and the project resumed.
Nantucket’s local community, however, was not satisfied to move on as quickly. Many felt disregarded in the rush to return to project timelines, left to pick up the pieces after already doing so quite literally. With the Haliade-X blade, Vineyard Wind promised to generate enough electricity to supply 400,000 homes and businesses in the greater commonwealth of Massachusetts. However, since the cable lines feed to New England grid on the mainland, it was not clear how much of that energy would directly contribute to Nantucket homes, or how much money would be saved from locals’ pockets after Vineyard Wind turned a profit. (Climate organizers in other states are fighting for publicly owned renewables for this very reason.)
Like many towns across the US, the Nantucket community faces an unprecedented affordability and housing crisis. Much of the island’s year-round residents earn a living in the trades by land or by sea; they do not fit the Nantucket stereotype of rich tourists who jet in for raw bar in lobster shorts and flee for the winter. There is an ever-growing and vulnerable immigrant population on the island. (My own Brazilian mother worked as a chef in the restaurants when I was growing up there.) It is not unusual for residents to create makeshift houses out of sheds or old shipping containers or to live out of their cars, while wealthy summer residents actively fight the construction of affordable housing. Islanders felt they were owed more than the promise of trickle-down benefits, especially considering other Massachusetts residents were not dealing with blade fragments in the sands where their children and pets play.
At the same time, as the climate crisis intensifies, Nantucket is in dire need of a global alternative to fossil fuels. In June 2025, the town enacted a mandatory water use restriction in response to severe drought conditions. Storm surges are only worsening, and houses fall into the ocean because of the rapid rate of erosion due to sea-level rise. The overwhelming majority of the scientific community agrees that wind energy, including offshore wind, is critical to the replacement of fossil fuels, which are the leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. While an array of renewable energy resources will be needed to replace oil and gas, the Nantucket region is particularly suited for offshore wind — as opposed to, say, nuclear energy or onshore wind — because there is a lot of surrounding water space and a lot of wind.
After a disaster like the blade break, however, short of abandoning the project entirely, it seemed there was little the executives could have said or done to convince the community that Vineyard Wind wanted to do right by them. Many were questioning to varying degrees whether the environmental costs of offshore wind energy truly outweighed the benefits. Nantucket is a place where people tend to favor solutions that combat climate change. And yet, they had quickly transformed into one of Vineyard Wind’s loudest adversaries.
Of the most vocal critics, one small, 501(c)(3) nonprofit group had been emphatically against Vineyard Wind long before the blade failure. ACK for Whales, headed by a handful of white-presenting women in their 50s and 60s, had been proclaiming for years — through op-eds, television appearances, podcast interviews, social media posts, public comment at town meetings, local events, and mailers — that offshore wind was a detriment to the endangered North Atlantic right whale, which migrates along the Eastern Seaboard. They weren’t the only ones: there was also Green Oceans in Rhode Island, Save Right Whales coalition, Protect Our Coast NJ. The list went on. Nonprofit groups up and down the East Coast were determined to stop the Vineyard Wind development and all other offshore wind projects going forward.
Vallorie Oliver, a local Nantucketer and home designer who co-founded ACK for Whales in 2019, even called the blade break a “blessing” because it exposed to the public how horrible offshore wind was for the environment. According to ACK for Whales (ACK is the airport code for Nantucket), everything from the sonar used to survey the ocean floor, to the manufacturing of the turbines, the pile driving during construction, and the vibrations during operation would cause irreversible damage and death to the North Atlantic right whale. The population of approximately 360 whales has been facing an “Unusual Mortality Event” since 2017.
ACK for Whales’ points made intuitive sense, in a way. It seemed plausible that one of the world’s largest offshore wind turbines, which was essentially a massive machine, would impact the marine life around it. After the blade break, I noticed that the group’s message was spreading across Nantucket. With ACK for Whales’ encouragement, two people I grew up with even decided to start their own 501(c)(3) nonprofit coalition of local island businesses aimed at stopping offshore wind. They launched the organization via an Instagram Reel with a voiceover that warned of “misinformation,” “secrecy,” and “corporate greed” revolving around offshore wind developments.
“Before the blade break, I was seeing about a 50-50 split,” explained Blair Perkins, an island resident who is one of the only few still outwardly supportive of the wind farm in the wake of the break. “When that accident happened, it went to more like 75 [percent] against or at least unsure.”
A few months ago, Perkins, who is in his 60s, posted a photograph to a Facebook group for year-round Nantucket residents of tangled fishing gear he collected on the beach. The page had become a hotbed of dispute about the wind farm, with supporters of ACK for Whales often leading the charge. He argued in his post that the turbine blade failure had been a rare event, whereas fishing gear detritus is a daily problem on Nantucket’s beaches. The old PSAs about plastic garbage choking sea turtles weren’t an exaggeration: hundreds of thousands of marine mammals and sea turtles die from entanglement in fishing gear a year. Along with vessel strikes, they are two of the leading causes of death for marine animals. His point was: if groups like ACK for Whales were concerned about the whales, then why weren’t they fighting to limit boat speeds or fishing gear debris?
When I met Perkins and his wife Rain Harbison, they were searching for injured seals on the island’s northern tip. Perkins is tall with a tender face and blue eyes. Harbison wears her hair in two long braids that rest over her shoulders. The duo patrols the beach in Perkins’ F-150 truck every day, for hours, in pursuit of flailing wildlife as part of their animal rescue organization. For about 25 years, Perkins ran an eco-tour business to teach tourists about the island’s natural history. Now he earns a living in the trades and, for half the year, he and Harbison live on a houseboat moored in the harbor.
Perkins believes the wind farm will actually help save marine ecosystems by restricting vessel traffic and draggers, the commercial fishing nets used to catch deep-sea fish that damage coral reefs and sea sponge beds. He said the turbines will be a safe haven for marine life — both in the short term, because of fewer boats, garbage, and fishing gear, and in the long term, thanks to the reduced carbon emissions.
Some studies do show that the turbines’ underwater columns and cable lines create what is called an “artificial reef effect,” promoting the growth of sponge, hydroid, and crustacean colonies, which can lead to an increase in other marine life that feed on those colonies. Most studies acknowledge, however, that more research is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn. Of course, that does not mean Perkins’ hypotheses are incorrect. Science is a reliable field because of the slow, meticulous process by which scientists build knowledge. Modern offshore wind turbines simply have not been around long enough to make scientific claims about their cumulative, lasting effects on marine ecosystems (though the impacts do not appear to be disproportionately large compared to onshore wind energy).
Vineyard Wind’s permitting process was its own prolonged scientific endeavor. The pre-construction phase lasted over a decade and included — among other federal, state, and local requirements — a nearly 500-page biological opinion that researched every species of concern in the area, even naming individual whales that might be impacted by the turbines, as well as an ongoing environmental impact statement. The Vineyard Wind team used these analyses to determine the best construction timeline and location of the build to mitigate effects as much as possible.
The special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which is considered a gold standard of scientific literature — does state definitively that wind energy, including offshore wind, is critical to the replacement of fossil fuels for the health of our planet, even when accounting for the potential impacts of construction, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning of wind farms. The scientific community is in agreement that offshore wind is a necessary and worthwhile pursuit. But when I looked for a perfect sentence that might dispel any doubt for a layperson — one that did not have qualifiers about needing more time and research — I could not find one. Scientists, by nature, are hesitant to make full-throated claims, especially about emerging fields. It will likely take many years before such a sentence from the scientific community exists, if it ever does.
ACK for Whales did not intend to wait. They were confident in their assessment that offshore wind farms are a menace to the environment. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) proposed a regulation to limit the speed of vessels traveling in Nantucket Sound for the explicit safety of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, ACK board member Amy DiSibio wrote an op-ed lambasting the regulation. She called NOAA “disingenuous” and said the proposal was an “offensive endeavor to feign concern for the [North Atlantic right whale].” (The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal intends to cut $1.7 billion from NOAA, which is considered one of the top research agencies in the world.) ACK for Whales was uninterested in solutions that addressed whale deaths related to vessel strikes, fishing gear entanglement, or climate change because they believed those causes were a distraction from the real culprit: the offshore wind industry.
Opposition to offshore wind has been building momentum on the island since the Cape Wind project in 2001, a proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound intended to be the first in the United States. William “Bill” Koch — whose infamous billionaire family made a fortune from fossil fuels — did not hide the fact that he would have a direct view of the wind farm from his compound in Osterville. Utilizing the nonprofit he chaired, Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, he committed to spending as much as it took in lawsuits to delay the project into oblivion.
The strategy worked. After a 12-year legal battle and hundreds of millions of dollars, the Cape Wind project never got off the ground. In the prevailing years, the Koch family has continued their crusade against offshore wind energy. Koch family foundations and other conservative power players have poured billions of dollars into building a vast and complex network of organizations that are devoted to obstructing sustainable energy projects.
Gone are the days of a Cape Wind-style takedown, when the power dynamic between fossil fuel billionaire and offshore wind opposition was direct and obvious. Today it is much more slippery. Anti-offshore-wind strategies have become uniquely localized and involve a collective effort from a wide variety of actors. Funding and support for these groups is tangled within 501(c)(3) nonprofits (which are not required to disclose their donation sources), think tanks, foundations, individuals, special interest groups, and coalitions. Small nonprofits operating within this network cannot be neatly described as “astroturfed,” since they may not directly accept money from a politically motivated source, allowing them to project a grassroots reputation.
Disinformation, or misleading information, is perhaps even more valuable than actual dollars to these organizations’ ability to sow discord. With the aid of powerful lobbyists and think tanks, local anti-offshore-wind groups find tricky ways to erode trust in scientific research and contradict effective solutions to the climate crisis. They trade textbook argumentation strategies to delay or deny climate action, such as cherry-picking data, deploying false experts, logical fallacies, red herrings, and conspiracy theories. It is unlikely that every offshore wind opponent or skeptic — such as a fisherman or concerned citizen — realizes that the talking points they might amplify on Facebook were most likely formulated by a right-wing consultant. The link between the fossil fuel industry and offshore wind opposition is even thornier to parse when climate denialism takes the shape of a wholesome environmental cause, like saving the whales.
In late January 2024, months before the blade failure, North Atlantic right whale #5120 was discovered dead on the neighboring island of Martha’s Vineyard. A passerby took a video of the beached whale and posted it on Instagram with the caption, “I saw with my own eyes. Zero evidence of entanglement anywhere on her,” and blamed Vineyard Wind for the whale’s death. ACK for Whales posted about the whale fatality on their Facebook page, where members frequently claim whales have died because of offshore wind, despite the fact that this theory has been debunked by experts. Even President Donald Trump has weighed in on the whale death conspiracy theory. He signed an executive order ending new offshore wind leases on the first day of his second term and, more recently, the Interior Department added significant layers of political review to the permitting process for existing leases. (In 2011, Trump lost a court case to stop an offshore wind farm from being erected near a golf course he owns in Scotland and has called them “ugly monsters.”)
“You see what’s happening in the Massachusetts area with the whales [dying],” he said on the campaign trail. “The wind mills are driving the whales crazy.” He told the podcaster Joe Rogan he wanted to become a whale psychiatrist.
A subsequent investigation involving multiple agencies and teams of scientists found that deep wounds from fishing gear entanglement killed right whale #5120. In fact, the whale had been entangled since 2021, when it was one year old. As the whale grew, the gear tightened and embedded around its tail.
By the time the investigation concluded, however, the original false claim had grown legs and spread across the internet. The majority of commenters on NOAA’s Facebook posts about the investigation claimed scientists had planted the rope or falsified the report. Nantucket’s most popular news outlet, Nantucket Current (“the Current”), included in its reporting the passerby’s conspiracy theory as a counterpoint to the scientific findings. When asked about why he had published the false claim, Current editor-in-chief Jason Graziadei , told The Provincetown Independent, “…she and others on [Martha’s] Vineyard questioned the official account that was being provided by authorities, so we wanted to know more about what she said she saw.”
Graziadei and I worked together in the early aughts at Nantucket’s weekly print newspaper, The Inquirer and Mirror (“the Inky”), back when we thought the biggest threat to journalism was web blogs. Graziadei was the lead news reporter on staff; he had a knack for developing sources in the community and regularly reported on front page stories. Two decades later, in 2021, N Magazine — a glossy lifestyle magazine based on Nantucket — approached him to start a news outlet. The original idea was that the Current would be an online newsletter, but Graziadei soon saw the potential for a social-media-driven news source. Without the manufacturing constraints of print news, he was able to scoop stories faster than the Inky ever could. The Current felt edgy and exciting, especially in its early days. Graziadei didn’t shy away from using cheeky humor or posting more provocative content, like livestreaming car accidents and house fires from its Instagram stories. The Current quickly became the ubiquitous way residents and non-residents got their Nantucket-related news. It now has 156,000 followers on Instagram and over 20,0000 followers on TikTok — numbers that far exceed the year-round population of around 15,000.
Graziadei is, in many ways, an unlikely reporter-cum-social media influencer. His face is nowhere to be found on the Current’s socials. He does not weigh in on arguments in the comments, though he does try to respond to every direct message.
“It’s been very intense,” he said of the Vineyard Wind story. The Current broke news of the blade failure by reposting photos that residents took of the debris washing ashore. “People stop me in the street or the supermarket. Everything is very heavily scrutinized through a political lens. Everything that’s written, every photo that’s published.”
Soon after the break, a charter boat captain sent Graziadei an unsolicited personal narrative he’d written about discovering the debris in the ocean, before it had reached the island’s shores. Graziadei found the story gripping and decided to publish it on the Current’s newsletter.
“It got a lot of hits, but it wasn’t huge,” he said. “So I thought, ‘We have to figure out a way to package this and get it out wider.’”
He created an Instagram Reel from up-close footage of the break, combined it with the charter boat captain’s piece, and set the reel to Hans Zimmer’s foreboding Dune score. The post has garnered 3.6 million views.
“I’m still getting notifications about people reading it six or seven months later.”
Given Graziadei’s traditional news background (he went to school for journalism), I wanted to know if he felt an inherent tension in running an unbiased outlet on social media, a space that is designed for sensationalist headlines to feed the algorithm. Controversy around the Vineyard Wind project, in particular, had clearly increased traffic to the Current’s accounts. How could he ensure he wasn’t falling victim to the algorithm’s embrace of outrage content?
Graziadei said that he follows the same reporting ethics he learned in school, well before Facebook and Instagram existed: a reporter is a neutral arbiter and the story should speak for itself.
“Some of the more sort of salacious stuff does, just by nature of social media, get more engagement,” he admitted. “If you lean into it in a way that’s responsible and respectful and still based in good journalism, then we’re going to go there… Now that we have a bigger audience, [the] really important stories can also reach more people.”
At the emergency Select Board meeting, Graziadei was in the audience wearing a Nantucket Current ball cap when his boss, the owner of N Magazine, Bruce Percelay, approached the microphone for public comment. If Graziadei claimed a neutral stance, Percelay, who is a real estate developer, certainly did not. He likened the blade failure to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Gulf of Alaska — one of the greatest environmental disasters of our time — and wanted to know if the town would be pursuing criminal charges against Vineyard Wind.
“The long-term implications for Nantucket in terms of the desirability of this place as a tourist destination… they could be absolutely enormous,” Percelay said.
He went on to explain how Amy DiSibio from ACK for Whales and N Magazine have been writing articles about the dangers of offshore wind for years. “Amy’s research has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the liabilities exceed the benefits of this project,” he said. “It’s time for Vineyard Wind and GE to take a hard look to see whether this idea is fundamentally flawed and should be terminated.”
This was not the first time Percelay’s opinion on environmental matters had been on display. In 2023, he was at a fundraiser on Nantucket for Governor Maura Healey when a group of climate activists interrupted the event to demand that Healey ban new fossil fuel infrastructure projects in Massachusetts. Percelay was filmed walking down the driveway while arguing with a 20-year-old protester. The protester told him her generation was going to die because of the effects of climate change.
“I don’t mind if you die,” Percelay told the protester while walking away.
Based on Percelay’s description of DiSibio’s research, I assumed she was a scientist. But she is not. DiSibio is a former Wall Street trader. Her husband, Carmine, was the global chairman and CEO of EY (formerly Ernst & Young) until 2024. Together with King Charles III, he co-founded Sustainable Markets Initiative, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that seeks to integrate the private sector, people, profit, and the planet by employing “private sector diplomacy,” and includes a sustainability initiative in space. The DiSibios own a seasonal residence near Nantucket’s South Shore, where the debris washed up, and where a faint silhouette of the wind farm is visible on the horizon.
DiSibio seemed reluctant at first to talk to me about her background on Wall Street, which she left years ago, and wanted me to know she has been involved in charitable work in her local New Jersey community. But she added that Wall Street gave her certain valuable skills, like how to handle difficult environments. As an assistant starting out, she had to buy cigars and cigarettes for the traders on her desk; her blouses had to be dry cleaned daily to get rid of the stench.
DiSibio got involved with ACK for Whales when she contacted Vallorie Oliver after learning about an offshore wind development off the coast of Montauk, which led her to Vineyard Wind. When I asked her how she developed a passion for the North Atlantic right whale, she talked more generally about the importance of whales to the Nantucket community.
“Even the local high school’s mascot is the Whalers,” she pointed out about my alma mater, an incongruous example, considering the mascot is a reference to the 19th century whaling industry that hunted North Atlantic right whales to the brink of extinction. (In 2013, students named the high school mascot “Hank the Harpoon Man.”)
Throughout our call, DiSibio expressed a deep-rooted mistrust in scientific institutions that support offshore wind. She described with urgency how “brain explosions” have occurred in North Atlantic right whales from the sonar used to survey sites for offshore wind developments; however, she said scientists are not willing to study whale behavior or go deep enough in a dead whale’s brain to see the combustion.
To illustrate her theory about how sonar kills whales, DiSibio told me a story about a dog she once had that got scared from the sound of fireworks, ran into the street, and was hit by a car. When I expressed my condolences, she said the event was traumatizing and that she no longer likes the Fourth of July. (Later, I discovered DiSibio told a similar story during an interview on Fox Business and again on ACK for Whales’ podcast, but in these tellings it was a hypothetical dog, not her own.)
Before DiSibio joined ACK for Whales, the group was called Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, or ACK RAT for short. In August 2021, cofounders Oliver and Mary Chalke held a press conference for ACK RAT in front of the Massachusetts state capitol building alongside a man named David Stevenson. Stevenson is a former member of the Trump administration’s EPA transition team and a director at the Caesar Rodney Institute, a think tank funded by the fossil fuel industry. He has helped drive legal challenges against offshore wind in local communities across the East Coast.
Stevenson, Oliver, and Chalke announced that ACK RAT had filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the federal agency that leases the water space to Vineyard Wind, alleging they had violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by permitting the project. They would be forming a new organization together called the American Coalition for Ocean Protection (ACOP). ACOP aligns conservative think tanks with local community groups toward the common goal of ending offshore wind projects, and includes a limited-use fund called the Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund. Stevenson would be the president of ACOP and ACK RAT would be a founding member organization, along with five think tanks — including the Caesar Rodney Institute — that are part of the State Policy Network, a 50-state group of Koch-affiliated think tanks.
Since their press conference at the state capitol building, and since DiSibio joined the group, however, ACK RAT has rebranded themselves as ACK for Whales and they have distanced themselves from Stevenson and ACOP.
“It looked bad,” DiSibio explained. “They were too political.”
Chalke, a retired physical therapist from New Jersey who owns a residence on Nantucket, has also separated from ACK for Whales, though she has not backed away from opposing offshore wind. She often appears at public events dressed up in a royal blue, polyester whale costume, holding a sign in the style of a Massachusetts license plate that says “Save Me.” She even donned the costume when President Joe Biden, who vacations on Nantucket, passed through the island in his motorcade. In February, Chalke announced she was running for an open seat on the Select Board.
ACK for Whales eventually lost their lawsuit against BOEM in the lower courts. They appealed twice, lost the appeals, and escalated the case to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the argument two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Meanwhile, DiSibio said they have issued two notices of intent to sue federal agencies over New England Wind, another planned offshore wind development off the coast of Nantucket. When Oliver spoke at the emergency Select Board meeting, she looked over at Møller and said, “Mr. Møller, we’ve met in court a few times.” Though ACK for Whale’s lawsuits have so far failed in legal proceedings, that may no longer be an obstacle: Trump’s Interior Department recently announced it would be reviewing wind projects that have been sued by opponents to consider rescinding their permits.
I wondered how ACK for Whales could afford to file multiple high-profile lawsuits without the financial assistance of ACOP and the Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund, when, by DiSibio’s estimation, they had a modest cash flow. To escalate their case to the US Supreme Court, for example, they needed to retain an attorney with special admission, a pricey endeavor.
DiSibio explained that the lawyers they hired were connected through friends or agreed to work pro-bono. (Both attorneys she mentioned by name, Thomas Stavola and David Hubbard, have also represented other anti-offshore-wind nonprofits in unsuccessful lawsuits against offshore wind projects.) The only money ACK for Whales accepted from Stevenson, DiSibio said, was $5,000 to create a mailer that was ultimately ineffective. (Stevenson has used mailers in other coastal communities to spread disinformation about offshore wind.)
“We are as grassroots as it gets,” she said.
Everything DiSibio instructed me to investigate about offshore wind energy — a network of dark money, partisan research, misinformation campaigns — I easily uncovered about the anti-offshore-wind movement. I imagined she would tell me this was by design; she had already expressed a skeptical relationship with journalists who, she said, “take a nugget of information and spin it to fit a predetermined agenda.” Her arguments were like peering into a trick mirror, where actual scientific evidence was an illusion and the absence of evidence represented a window of possibility. She suggested I needed to go beyond the scientific research, dig deeper into the belly of the whale, to discover the truth.
“If you want to do the work to get to the bottom of the money funding offshore wind, it would be a Pulitzer Prize [winning] book,” DiSibio told me. She said she was shocked to learn in her fifties that, “the biggest bag of money will get you whatever you want.”
When I suggested she must have learned about the power of money from her days as a trader on Wall Street, she went silent for the first time in our conversation.
“But that was good,” she said. “And I was working with companies, not individuals.”
If you search “fishing Block Island wind farm” on Youtube, a trove of videos will appear by recreational and charter boat fishermen near the Block Island wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. “Wow, they are frickin’ huge!” one video begins with an upward shot of the five 600-foot turbines. The Block Island wind farm has become a favorite spot for fishermen in Rhode Island. Some even advertise the turbines as a unique feature of their fishing tours.
“I’ve been told by many charter boat fishermen that, if for some reason they’re not catching fish, they go to the Block Island wind farm,” said Jennifer McCann, the director of US coastal programs at the University of Rhode Island (URI) and director of extension programs for Rhode Island Sea Grant.
In 2008, McCann’s team was tapped by state agencies to craft a regulatory document called a special area management plan, or SAMP, for offshore wind planning in Rhode Island. At the time, Cape Wind was still tied up in a legal battle with Bill Koch; if Block Island wind farm made it through the inevitable hurdles, it would be the first operational wind farm in the country. Today, the wind farm generates enough electricity to power the entirety of Block Island and 12,500 households on the mainland.
Photo by Kit Noble
All offshore wind developments — whether a five-turbine farm built on state waters, as Block Island wind farm is, or a 62-turbine farm on federal waters like Vineyard Wind –— must undergo a complex, multiyear permitting and approval process that includes, by law, a community outreach component.
With the SAMP process, McCann’s team took a unique approach to how they would engage local residents, fishermen, marine businesses, labor unions, and Native tribes. Rather than have regulators and developers lead the siting and mapping process themselves — as BOEM and Vineyard Wind did — they were brought on as an independent body, supported by an academic institution in URI, that had already been working with the people of Rhode Island for decades. McCann figured it would benefit everyone to harness the community’s knowledge of the region, while also providing scientific solutions to their concerns. This wasn’t simply a creative way to convince the public to buy into the project, though buy-in was an important benefit. Members of McCann’s team were Rhode Islanders, too, and therefore had a personal stake in ensuring the project addressed community, scientific, and economic goals equally.
The SAMP process lasted for about two years and included more than 100 public meetings. They ordered catered dinner — chicken, warm soup, lasagna, cookies — to ensure attendees were fed before the sometimes tense discussions. McCann would eat her own dinner at 4:30PM, before everyone else arrived, because she knew one of her biggest jobs was to get to know the attendees while they ate before the formal meeting began at 6PM. They received more than 2,000 responses from the public, which they in turn used to conduct research and write policy for the SAMP. McCann now teaches the adaptable and scalable model to practitioners around the world.
“[The Rhode Island community] influenced what we talked about and how we talked about it,” McCann said. “Over the years I’ve gone to [offshore wind] meetings in the Gulf of Maine, and in Massachusetts, and New York, and I feel like I’m back in Rhode Island in 2008. People are asking the same questions and having the same concerns.”
That’s not to imply Vineyard Wind and BOEM did not engage communities and local industries as part of their planning process. They did — outreach is a required component of permitting. In contrast to the SAMP process, however, which took place at the forefront of the project, public engagement for Vineyard Wind occurred in tandem with major project milestones. The first 30-day comment period was in early 2018 in preparation for BOEM to begin work on the environmental impact statement. BOEM and Vineyard Wind representatives held five meetings around Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Nantucket’s meeting was on April 18th, 2018. Five more meetings were held in 2019 after the draft environmental impact statement was published. In the summer of 2020, when BOEM and Vineyard Wind released the supplement to the draft environmental impact statement, they held a 45-day comment period and a series of five meetings over Zoom because of the pandemic lockdown. (No free meals were provided, of course.) According to Vineyard Wind’s website, the comment period resulted in “over 29,000 people [who submitted] comments overwhelmingly in support of Vineyard Wind 1 and future offshore wind energy development.”
Who’s to say how Rhode Island’s community would have reacted if a Block Island wind farm blade had scattered across their beaches. But Nantucketers I spoke with felt particularly insulted by the fact that most did not know who the Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova executives were when they swooped in to solve the issue. During the emergency town meeting, one executive mentioned he had woken up in Europe that morning and rushed to Massachusetts to join them, presumably to convey how seriously he took the issue. But the statement had a chilling effect. One resident started her public comment with, “I didn’t wake up in Europe today. I woke up on a Nantucket covered in fiberglass.”
The SAMP process engaged in an essentially Freirean pedagogy of community organizing, where the community’s experience and collective knowledge was a foundational part of enacting change. McCann believes the project has been a success in large part because of the people-first approach they took.
“Our humbleness is what makes us successful. Even though I know that isn’t a very humble thing to say.”
Still, culture has shifted in significant ways in the intervening decades since 2008. I asked McCann if her perspective on community organizing had evolved, considering many people now consider an Instagram Reel as equivalent to a scientific paper. Academic institutions were being systematically defunded, making it difficult for teams like McCann’s coastal program to stay afloat.
“Our traditional way of doing public engagement and building trust is not going to work anymore,” McCann said. “We’ve attended many [offshore wind] events where people are disrespectful. They come dressed as whales. They are there to disrupt. Scientists are also feeling like no one’s listening to them. The traditional way of communicating information is just not working.”
One of the disruptors McCann was referencing (though not by name) was, in fact, ACK for Whales’ co-founder Mary Chalke, who appeared seated in the front row at a meeting in Little Compton, Rhode Island in her quintessential whale costume, holding her Massachusetts license plate “Save Me” sign.
McCann said they were exploring options to reach people other than public meetings, which attract agitators who do not intend to engage in meaningful conversation. One plan she mentioned was starting a podcast, a proposition I found disheartening compared to the bonding in-person chicken dinners she had described (though I did discover McCann and her work through a podcast interview).
“And I feel we need more science,” she added.
I returned to Nantucket on a gray Saturday in mid-May, nearly a year after the blade break and just a couple weeks shy of Memorial Day weekend, when the island’s population more than quintuples for the summer season. That Tuesday, residents would vote in the local election to fill two vacant seats on the Select Board. Chalke had thrown her hat in the ring for one seat, while the incumbents, Brooke Mohr and Matt Fee, were running for reelection. Mohr, who was chair at the time of the blade break, seemed at the greatest risk of an upset. Homemade bumper stickers that read “No Mohr Turbines” appeared on the backs of cars and trucks circling around the island.
I wondered if I would encounter Chalke campaigning on the side of the road in her infamous whale costume — a sight that would surely be memorable for voters — but she opted for civilian clothes instead. And her slogan, “Put Chalke on the Board,” did not advertise her cornerstone issue. Her campaign website contained little more than a homepage with a link to donate.
In a video interview with a Boston real estate agent posted to her X account in December, Chalke gave a tour of the beach near her house to demonstrate the destruction Vineyard Wind had caused. But the video undermined her own point: Chalke could not find any debris and the turbines were not visible on the horizon. “I’m not seeing [any debris],” she said in the video as the ocean tide rolled against the sand. “But the really concerning parts … they can’t be seen,” she reiterated. The real estate agent commented on how gorgeous this beach was, even more gorgeous than the beach near his own home. Chalke laughed slightly. “You can’t see [the turbines] right now because it’s foggy. But they are very visible. They actually dominate the view.”
If the election had occurred ten months prior, I have no doubt the blade break would have been a more salient topic for voters. But I got the sense that islanders were already growing weary of the controversy. In September 2024, Martella, the CCO of GE Vernova, had joined a Select Board meeting by Zoom to update the community on the initial results from the environmental impact analysis. The independent findings showed that the ocean water met EPA standards and was considered safe. He was speaking to a practically empty room. (Oliver, the ACK for Whales co-founder, was one of the few in attendance.) A town meeting had been scheduled the day prior to vote on short-term rental regulations, another hotly contested issue, which some surmised resulted in low turnout at the Select Board meeting. Then in February, lightning struck the damaged turbine, which reanimated debate around Vineyard Wind, but the event failed to capture the public’s attention like the blade break had.
Before I arrived on island, I had arranged to meet with a local charter boat captain who was a central figure in the opposition last summer. I was hoping he could take me out on his boat to get a closer look at the turbines; because they were barely visible from the shore, I wanted to witness their scale out on the water. But the day before we were supposed to meet, he canceled. It would take about five hours total for us to travel back and forth to the wind farm site, which was an expensive trip. Plus, he said he wasn’t as keen to be a leading voice in the wind farm debate anymore.
I asked some friends if they knew of any fishermen who would want to meet me last minute. I was quickly connected to Brooks Robbie, a handsome, curly-haired commercial fisherman who works for Dan Pronk, the audience member who confronted Møller at the emergency town meeting. They wouldn’t be able to take me out to the wind farm, unfortunately, but they could meet in the afternoon after they returned from collecting conch traps.
Everyone I spoke with who knew Pronk, or who knew of him, told me three things: he hates the wind farm; he loves Donald Trump; and he has a temper. We arranged to meet at his boat slip when they got in, but when I arrived at the Anglers’ Club where they had docked, Robbie informed me I had just missed Pronk. He was out getting ropes and beer.
I said I could wait and sat on the docks while Robbie scrubbed the deck. Pronk’s fishing boat, which he keeps immaculately clean, was adorned with an American flag and a sticker that read, “Go Blue… Burn Whale Oil.”
Soon, a short, muscular man with a gravelly voice walked onto the docks carrying a bucket of rope. “There’s Pronk,” another fisherman announced. I realized I was nervous to meet him. When I had Googled Pronk hours earlier, I found a profile that recounted a convoluted story about how he had been arrested by environmental police for illegal whale ivory smuggling. He said he had found a whale skull while fishing and drove around with it in the bed of his truck.
I asked permission to hop aboard his boat from the docks. He joked that if I slipped and fell, he’d have to take me for a ride out to sea. I laughed, maybe because I worried he might be serious, but also because I found his delivery funny. Pronk had a wry sense of humor that reminded me of Massachusetts. He intermixed his diatribes about government regulations and permit caps on lobster traps with quips like, “Fishing is the second oldest profession in the world, after prostitution.”
Many of Pronk’s grievances with the wind farm were tied up in his general distaste for government interference. His most direct complaint had to do with a mud flat where he once regularly fished for lobsters that he said has been depleted since construction on Vineyard Wind began. Though, he acknowledged that lobster fishing is inherently unpredictable, and that no lobster fisherman can return to the same spot and assume it will deliver again. (The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association are undergoing a multiyear survey to assess lobster populations near Vineyard Wind.)
Robbie grumbled in agreement as Pronk decried foreign-owned renewable energy companies in American waters. At one point he even shouted out “drill, baby, drill!” He seemed to be both razzing Pronk and encouraging him at the same time. Earlier, while we were waiting for Pronk to return with the ropes, Robbie told me he’d noticed an increase in mahi-mahi fish near the turbines, which thrive near reef structures. “It can’t be as bad as the diesel fuel we burn every day,” he said of the blade break, gesturing to the boats around us. Robbie did not express any ambivalence about the turbines in front of his boss, however. It was in his best interest to stay on Pronk’s good side.
After about an hour of hauling conch bins into the harbor, where they would hang until it was time to sell them, Robbie and Pronk each popped open a bottle of Heineken. They didn’t always drink beer at the end of the day, Pronk said, but today had been a particularly successful day of conch fishing. Pronk then invited me and my accompanying photographer over to his house to show us the anti-wind-farm sign he had made out of a piece of blade debris.
Pronk’s wife was mowing the front yard as we pulled up. His dog Rudder waited for a treat by the freezer in his garage. “This is what we call the shake down,” Pronk said while feeding his dog a frozen sardine. In the corner of the garage, I spotted a Make America Great Again flag hanging on the wall. Pronk was clearly a fan of iconography — the bumper stickers on his boat, the flags, the anti-Vineyard Wind painting he designed on a sheet of fiberglass from the blade. These symbols and signs all contributed to his reputation as an anti-Big Government lobsterman with a kink for provocation.
On the back of his truck were even more bumper stickers. One read, “Vineyard Wind Can Blow Me” and another, “No Mohr Turbines.”
“Was this you?” I asked, pointing to the Mohr sticker.
Pronk grinned. He was hopeful that Mohr would lose the election because of her handling of the blade break and the negotiations between Vineyard Wind and the town, specifically the contract the Select Board signed in 2020 called the “Good Neighbor Agreement.” He and others were additionally frustrated with the faulty aircraft detection lighting system that Vineyard Wind had yet to fix, which meant the turbines glowed with blinking red lights at night. From what I could tell, Mohr and Fee’s platforms had not changed from the last time they ran, while Chalke represented a radical, staunch opinion on a hot-button topic. Would that be enough for voters to oust an incumbent for a different face, one sometimes hidden behind a whale head?
The results said no. Mohr and Fee won their reelections with over a thousand votes each. Chalke received 499 votes. Two months later, GE Vernova reached a settlement with the town of Nantucket for $10.5 million, which would help create a fund to reimburse businesses that suffered from the blade failure.
For renewable energy opponents, however, the local election on Nantucket did not matter very much. The Trump administration was continuing to roll back environmental regulations, eliminate tax credit incentives for renewable energy projects, increase the tax on wind and solar specifically, and put an end to new offshore wind leases. Compared to solar and electric vehicles, wind energy adoption has struggled the most: in 2020, the US was building about 14 gigawatts of wind energy annually, enough to power about 10 million households. Today, we are building about half that number. Offshore wind developers with active contracts have been quietly waiting, crossing their fingers for a new administration in a few years, rather than risk a public fight with President Trump.
Meanwhile, since BSEE lifted the suspension order in January, construction on Vineyard Wind resumed. When I returned to the island again in July, my flight passed over the expanding wind farm project, which had reportedly reached 220 megawatts of its intended 800 megawatt energy production, with 17 turbines sending power to the grid. This was a significant increase from only four operational turbines in May, but far beyond their original completion goal of 2024. Construction would likely continue into 2026. From above, I could finally sense the wind farm’s breadth, a grid of white pinwheels dotting a cerulean sea. Offshore wind opponents often remark on how enormous each turbine is, but most islanders, including myself, will never experience their size up close. I’ve only ever seen this bird’s-eye view of the Vineyard Wind turbines, or as small apparitions on the horizon, occasionally appearing from behind a hazy cloak.
Before we left Pronk’s house, I asked if I could see the garden in his backyard, which was lined with a fence made of old lobster traps to help keep the deer out. Overhead, Pronk pointed out an unusual sight: towering above his yard, behind a row of trees and power lines, was an 80-foot defunct wind turbine, built by a private resident in the early 1980s. The resident recounted to the Inky in 2007 (back when Graziadei and I both worked there) that the one turbine on their property generated enough electricity to run their house. Any excess energy the house did not use was sold to the local electric utility company. Around the same time, a farm on the island installed a fleet of turbines in reaction to the oil shortage of the 1970s.
After 10 years, however, the resident’s turbine had mechanical problems and the private company that manufactured it, Aerolite, went bankrupt, so no one has revitalized the once useful energy source. The decommissioned turbine still sits on the same property nearly 45 years later.
The irony was not lost on Pronk. He couldn’t stand seeing Vineyard Wind out on the water — a constant reminder of a bloated government’s intrusion — yet this structure didn’t bother him. “It’s kind of weird that that’s what I look at every day. But I don’t mind it,” he said, smirking at the blade-less turbine against a cloudy sky. I was surprised by his serene attitude, considering he lives with the symbol of his ire right in his backyard, and he was a man who believed in the power of a sign. But it seemed that, over time, Pronk had arrived at his own understanding of a defunct turbine’s environmental value: “The red-tailed hawks and ospreys like to nest up there,” he said.
