The structural issues with wind turbines which has Chris O'Keefe worried 03:58

Now there are some major issues brewing overseas with offshore wind turbines. And I mean major, major issues with offshore wind turbines. Yep. Now the Vineyard Wind Offshore Wind Farm, it's at Nantucket Island, which is off the coast of Boston in the United States.

And that's 24 kilometres from the beaches of the island. There is a planned wind farm that is starting to be operational. 62 turbines capable of generating just shy of a gigawatt of power. Now, this is very, very similar, albeit smaller in scale, to what's being proposed for off the coast of Newcastle and Wollongong.

Now, the entire program in Nantucket has been suspended. All of it. The US government has ordered that the wind farm, the offshore wind farm, needs to cease operating immediately. You know why? The wind turbine blades started to break apart. I'm not joking. The massive turbine blade, it's as long as a football field. It's 100 metres long, this blade. It broke apart and folded over in July.

And since then, foam debris and fiberglass, including some large and very sharp pieces, have washed up onto beaches. The U.S. Coast Guard reckon they found a 300-foot piece of the blade. Now, following the failure, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement in the United States, they issued a suspension order that directs Vineyard Wind to halt any power production operations or new construction activity.

now these wind turbines they're made by general electric not some tin pot company general electric and they're made in germany the united states and india and it's not just a one-off it's not like it's some freak accident their wind turbines the blades have snapped off on projects in germany sweden lithuania and the united kingdom now one of the reasons they're in what they're investigating as to why this is happening

is that the engineering challenges that these companies are confronted with when they put wind turbines double the size of the harbour bridge, bolt them to the seabed and then hope for the best. Now the Vineyard Wind Project is the first large-scale offshore wind farm anywhere in the United States to begin initial operations and it's already been suspended because the blades are breaking off.

There were six truckloads of debris from this wind turbine, found two, but everything is supposedly tickety-boo, isn't it, here in Australia? Just ask Chris Bowen, just ask Tanya Plibersek. Everything is just tickety-boo when it comes to offshore wind off the coast of Newcastle and Wollongong. It'll be straightforward, Chris Bowen reckons, to bolt hundreds of wind turbines double the size of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and 200 tonnes each...

to the outskirts of the continental shelf across 1,000 kilometres from Stanwell Tops to Kiama or Port Stephens to Norah Head. Tickety-boo, no problems. Easy as. Honestly. We have wind turbine blades breaking off in the US, UK, Sweden, Lithuania and Germany. You've got the first offshore project in America suspended only a few months into its operation. Are we really that confident that this will be good practice here in Australia?

This is a big, big risk. And Chris Bowen and the federal government is not talking about these risks. They are not telling us the potential consequences if this goes wrong. We'll just look at Nantucket. The blades are breaking off and operations have been suspended. Do you really think it'll work here?