A New Jersey shore community is calling on state regulators and an offshore wind company to conduct a transparent and detailed safety analysis on the turbines selected for the Atlantic Shores South Project.

Save Long Beach Island, a group dedicated to preserving the New Jersey shoreline, sent two invitations to the developers of the Atlantic Shores South Project to participate in a panel discussion on the proposed 200 wind turbines plotted for 8.7 miles offshore. Both requests were ignored. 

The founder of Save Long Beach Island, Robert Stern, has many concerns with the project, but his fear only grew following the collapse of a wind turbine blade from the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Nantucket this summer.

The 300-foot blade manufactured by GE Vernova washed up on a beach; it was the second blade manufactured by the company to break off. 

Between April and November of this year, there have been nine known incidents of wind turbines collapsing in both the United States and abroad. At least four of these turbine failures have been with Vesta turbines, the manufacturer that Atlantic Shores South selected. 

“The Vineyard Wind disaster and the many others like it are wake-up calls that raise serious concerns about the structural integrity of wind turbines and the long-term impact of such failures on the environment — the effects of which are still being felt in Nantucket four months later,” Stern said. “Even some proponents of offshore wind are now questioning whether the obvious risks are worth the purported benefits. Is this what those of us who live in the shadow of Atlantic Shores South have to look forward to?”

In recent years, turbine failures have been on an uptick as developers are pushing to create bigger turbines.

“It takes time to stabilize production and quality on these new products,” Larry Culp, General Electric CEO, said last October to Bloomberg. “Rapid innovation strains manufacturing and the broader supply chain.”

In the past five years, there has been a push to jump from 8 megawatts to 18 MW turbines in a much faster period than moving from 3 MW to 8 MW. However, this jump is leading to a concerning number of losses.

The Atlantic Shores South project has chosen to use a “super-sized” Vestas V236-15.0 MW wind turbine, making it one of the first projects to deploy this new technology. Skeptics say it was never tested in the marine environment, but instead, safety testing was conducted on a land-based prototype turbine in Denmark.

Save Long Beach Island has called for details on the structural integrity of these wind turbines and their ability to withstand natural disasters, information on the hazards associated with each material, and an analysis of the components failing in the marine environment. These requests directly to the developers and state regulators come after a blade manufacturing facility in Canada was accused of falsifying quality-control data.

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Meanwhile, the project approvals for Atlantic Shores South were granted even though the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium commissioned by the NJ Board of Public Utilities has yet to complete its study.

The Washington Examiner reached out to Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind and the NJ Board of Public Utilities for comment.