A new kind of gold rush is underway on the West Coast — but this time, it’s not underground.
A short distance off California’s wild and rugged coastline, nearly 600 miles of ocean have been designated for the development of sprawling wind farms, a sign that the Pacific is fast becoming the next frontier of California’s clean-energy economy.
“We’re talking about potentially 20% of California’s electricity supply” coming from offshore wind, said Adam Stern, executive director of Offshore Wind California, a trade association. “To have a planning target like that to shoot for, it’s the kind of thing that got humans on the moon.” But until now, two-thirds of America’s wind power potential has been located in water too deep for the traditional fixed-bottom turbines, the pinwheeled structures bolted to the seafloor near the shoreline. That’s why states are ramping up efforts to install floating turbines up to 40 miles offshore, where winds blow stronger and faster.
Generating power in the ocean may also free overburdened communities from the polluting proximity of oil and gas plants. “Forty percent of our gasoline in California is in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and to ultimately shut down those polluting power plants, we have to have an alternative,” said Hoschild.
Then there are questions of connecting the energy generated at sea to the land. The North Coast site near Eureka largely lacks the transmission infrastructure needed to transfer energy across the state, but it does have a deep-water port critical to the turbines’ buildout, assembly and placement. In contrast, the Central Coast site, near Morro Bay, has the transmission capacity thanks to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant but not the accompanying port infrastructure.
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