Summer blockbusters aren’t usually memories by the time school starts, let alone at Halloween. Not so for Nantucket’s 2024 remake of “Jaws.” The reprisal of Steven Spielberg’s fictitious Amity Island, with beaches closed and summer tourism in the tank, didn’t have the pizazz of the original, but it’s enduring. 

This time the monster besieging the island isn’t a man-eating “miracle of evolution.” It’s the more prosaic and predictable government practice of picking winners and losers, along with bureaucratic arrogance. Huge and scary in its own way, the Vineyard Wind installation 15 miles south of Nantucket doesn’t have the same shock value as a shark. In fact, it has no shock value because it hasn’t generated a watt of electricity since July. 

And it won’t anytime soon. On October 23, the Nantucket Current reported that the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) “continues to prohibit the company from resuming power production, the installation of blades, and conducting any activity on the damaged turbine known as AW-38.” 

Vineyard Wind, touted as the first utility-scale offshore wind project, is part of the Administration’s push to sideline fossil fuels and make the U.S. more dependent on solar and wind. The Administration bet huge (with taxpayer money) on offshore wind. It hasn’t gone well.

When a blade of a Vineyard Wind turbine broke off in mid-July, sending masses of debris to Nantucket’s beaches, it was a visible sign of trouble in green energy paradise. Private developers have pulled out of two projects off New Jersey before they started. Off Rhode Island, federal agencies overseeing the South Fork wind project alienated and angered municipalities, Indian tribes, tourism boards, historic associations, commercial fishermen and more. A detailed letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management from the groups’ lawyers said, “We have never seen a more dysfunctional process than the one BOEM has imposed …. At every juncture, BOEM has failed to listen to or consider the concerns of historic communities and Tribal Nations.” 

The government was in too big a hurry remaking the energy sector to consult with those who’ll live with its legacy. The at-all-costs haste is evident in internal BOEM documents. Companies that lease federal drilling sites must buy bonds or produce financial assurance showing they can safely shut down sites and not leave taxpayers on the hook for cleanup. Vineyard Wind should have had to do the same.

But BOEM has found financial assurance a useful political tool. In the Gulf of Mexico, BOEM made the rules more onerous for small oil and gas companies. The needless change may drive hundreds of small firms and their thousands of employees out of business. That’s one of the “sticks” of the administration’s green energy plan.

Vineyard got the corresponding carrot. It asked for a waiver. BOEM obliged, reasoning that Vineyard Wind’s “proven technology” and “guaranteed electric sales prices” would protect taxpayers.

According to the Nantucket Current, BSSE conducted a “comprehensive and independent investigation” and Vineyard Wind spent “thousands of hours” and coordinated with multiple federal agencies to come up with a safe way to remove the damaged blade.

It takes “thousands of hours” of planning and the mobilization of federal agencies to replace a single turbine blade. Every day Vineyard doesn’t make electricity is a loss for the company, its partners and investors. Worst of all, it’s a loss for taxpayers. Whatever the future of renewable energy, Vineyard Wind may have set it back. Much more of this “proven technology,” and we’re gonna need a bigger boat. 

Pete McGinnis is the Communications Director of the Functional Government Initiative.