At 10x scale, this could really make sense.
This week I attended the Pacific Offshore Wind Summit, a conference for folks planning offshore floating wind farms for California’s coast.
Not knowing much about these projects, I was shocked to learn:
- There’s pervasive doubt that the tens of billions in funding required for these offshore wind projects will materialize (only about a billion has been spent or committed so far).
- Even if the turbines do get built, they won’t start operating until the mid-2030s.
- The total maximum planned capacity (best case) is 25 gigawatts. This seems tiny for ten years from now; the Chinese are already installing that much renewable capacity right now in 2024 – every single month!
I realize large infrastructure projects are difficult to build in the U.S. (and especially California). And I could see how hard the many talented, committed folks in the offshore wind ecosystem are working to make this happen (from marine biologists to engineers to businesspeople and policy folks and tribal and labor leaders – there were so many great people at this conference).
But I was floored by the magnitude of the obstacles I learned about:
- Many stakeholders seem to be viewing these wind projects primarily as economic development opportunities (for Humboldt county and the central coast), rather than clean energy investments.
- The ocean areas set aside for these wind farms, off California’s north and central coasts, are nowhere near the populations centers (like SF or LA) which need their electricity; no one seems to have clear answers about how the transmission required to get the energy there would be built.
- The planned turbines will be located so far from the demand because 90+% of California’s coastline is legally and politically off-limits (e.g. federally protected marine areas).
- The projects will require billions in one-time upgrades to Californias ports: upgrades that don’t seem useful for much else other than assembling wind turbines. This doesn’t seem like it will ever pay back economically.
And perhaps most concerning, it doesn’t seem 100% clear that California will actually need these wind farms to meet its 2045 renewable energy goals, given how fast battery and other clean technologies are moving down the cost curve.
By then, solar plus storage (plus onshore wind, geothermal and demand response) could potentially be capable of providing all the clean power California needs. The chairman of California’s Energy Commission, who spoke at the conference, himself noted that utility scale battery capacity in California has grown exponentially from one to ten gigawatts in just three years.
So the planned 25 gigawatts (or less) doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. But what could make sense is to think bigger.
Rather than investing tens of billions to build 25 gigawatts of wind, why not invest some incremental amount more to build 250 gigawatts? We’d get true economies of scale, and could use the output to power the entire west coast, plus green hydrogen hubs and exports, AI data centers, green industrial manufacturing, you name it.
Offshore wind is succeeding in Europe because of its critical mass and economies of scale there. And they’re thinking big: there’s 120 gigawatts of offshore wind pledged for the North Sea by 2030, and 300 gigawatts by 2050.
I’d love to see offshore wind get built in California. These floating turbines are incredible machines, as tall as seventy story buildings, each producing up to twenty megawatts each (enough to power 10,000 homes).
But if we’re going to make a gigantic investment on this (between the state and federal governments, utility ratepayers and private investment), lets build enough of them to really get the payoff!