Litigation victory for Vineyard Wind Project

Davis Polk successfully obtained a preliminary injunction order on behalf of its client, Vineyard Wind 1 LLC (Vineyard Wind), in Massachusetts Superior Court. The order ensures that GE Renewables, the principal contractor on the Vineyard Wind Project, will continue to provide services critical to the project’s completion.

The Vineyard Wind project is a large commercial-scale wind project located off the coast of Nantucket, which is on the verge of bringing online 806 megawatts of renewable energy to Massachusetts in furtherance of the Commonwealth’s renewable energy mandate. The project is the first utility-scale offshore windfarm in the United States and its progress is being closely watched by the industry.

The project has been in the news, most prominently as a result of a the failure of a GE Haliade-X blade (nearly the length of a football field) that collapsed into the water in July of 2024, resulting in a massive environmental cleanup and requiring a six-month construction hiatus during which GE Renewables performed a “root cause” analysis concluding that 68 of the 72 GE blades installed at the project were also defective because they were inadequately bonded together. GE’s admittedly poor performance caused catastrophic delays and financial harm to Vineyard Wind, giving rise to substantial claims by Vineyard Wind against GE Renewables amounting to more than $850 million to date.

Today, all of those blades have been replaced and as of a few weeks ago, all 62 wind turbines that make up the project have been constructed. The project is now in the commercially-critical phase of having the performance of the turbines optimized to achieve commercial levels of power production and reliability. In the midst of that work, GE Renewables issued a Termination Notice to Vineyard Wind, announcing that it was terminating the Turbine Supply Agreement (TSA) between GE Renewables and Vineyard Wind and walking off the project on April 28, 2026.

On April 8, Davis Polk filed a two-count complaint on behalf of Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts Superior Court along with a motion for a preliminary injunction for the purpose of preventing GE Renewables from stopping its work on the project. GE Renewables’ Termination Notice claimed the termination was justified because GE Renewables had not been paid for its work in 18 months. Vineyard Wind disputed the nonpayment because GE Renewables owes more money to Vineyard Wind from the blade failures than Vineyard Wind owes GE Renewables for construction milestones, and Vineyard Wind has been offsetting the amounts as it is allowed to do under the TSA.

After a hearing on April 16, Justice Peter B. Krupp agreed with Vineyard Wind, granting its motion in full. The court found that Vineyard Wind that is likely to succeed on the merits because “it does not appear that there was any ‘amount due’” to GE Renewables as a result of Vineyard Wind’s setoffs. The court also determined that Vineyard Wind would be irreparably harmed absent an injunction, stating that the loss of Vineyard Wind’s “principal contractor would set the project back immeasurably and threaten its financing.” The court found that, “The work required to bring the project into commercial viability is highly dependent on GER’s capabilities, personnel and technology,” and to “pretend that VW could go out and hire one or more contractors” to replace GE Renewables, as GE Renewables had argued, is “fanciful.”

The decision paves the way for project completion, five years in the making. The project is set to go online in a matter of weeks, bringing low-cost renewable energy to Massachusetts energy customers.

The Davis Polk team included partners Frances E. Bivens and Michael Scheinkman, counsel Craig J. Bergman, William J. Hochul Jr. and Marc J. Tobak and associates Rahul Krishnan, Christina Davis and Daniel Moubayed. Members of the Davis Polk team are based in the New York and Washington DC offices.

Vineyard Wind is also represented by Jack Pirozzolo of Sidley Austin LLP.