The Fickle Promise of Offshore Wind Energy
Jock O’Connell
It seems it’s periodically necessary to remind California’s legion of visionaries that this is a state where even the most modest public works proposal is guaranteed to draw more litigant than the Oakland A’s draw fans.
My sermon this month is prompted by all the excitement being generated (pun unintended) by the plans to install wind farms in two areas off the Golden State’s coast, far enough out so the sight of them would hopefully not offend the sensibilities of those with beachfront property.
At the moment, ports along the California coast are vying to become the onshore base for those enormous offshore wind turbines that are expected to help power the state’s all-electric future.
The Port of Humboldt in Northern California is pitching itself as the support facility for the offshore wind farm designed for Humboldt Bay, one of two offshore leases the federal government auctioned off this past December.
The other lease, off Morro Bay in Central California, has drawn an ambitious proposal from the Port of Long Beach, which earlier this month unveiled plans for a massive floating facility where wind turbines would be manufactured and serviced. The $4.7 billion Pier Wind facility, as it’s being dubbed, would cover 400 Acres.
Perhaps now that the Port of Oakland’s Howard Terminal is apparently no longer on the chopping block, the East Bay port may formulate its own bid. Unlike offshore wind turbines anchored to the seabed, the geology of the deep waters off the West Coast will necessitate floating structures that would tower higher than Monsieur Eiffel’s edifice in Paris.
These soaring turbines would be held in place by teams of specially trained dolphins tugging on silken ropes. The electricity being generated would be beamed up to an array of geosynchronous satellites that would, in turn, redirect the power to panels placed on the roofs of every private residence, public building, and commercial structure statewide.
Okay, maybe not. But as is the case with many of the green energy proposals being floated these days, the aspirations of politicians and bureaucrats seem invariably to run well ahead of the hard labor of the engineers responsible for punching through technological barriers. In few instances is the prayerful conviction that the appropriate technologies will ripen at just the right moment more evident than with respect to delivering all this new offshore energy to end-users.
As a February 2023 U.S. Department of Energy report makes clear, energy harvested from offshore turbines will have to come ashore and be integrated into the state’s already stressed landside power distribution grid. The report reviewed 30 studies of electricity generation and transmission on the West Coast. It concluded that the existing onshore transmission grid, especially in Northern California, “is insufficient to integrate offshore wind from current BOEM [Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] lease and call areas”.
Is this shortfall in connective capacity being aggressively addressed? Perhaps it is. But it is certainly not encouraging that California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild failed to say a single word about the lamentably deficient grid during his fifteen-minute keynote address to the Pacific Offshore Wind Summit in Sacramento on May 9.
Which gets us back to the most fundamental obstacle to achieving the state’s zero-emission goals. As it turns out, the most daunting barriers are not technological at all. Rather, to paraphrase James Carville’s famously succinct 1992 advice to then presidential candidate Bill Clinton: It’s the politics, stupid.
If the notion of bouncing electricity off of satellites seems whimsical, I would submit that the alternative – the necessarily massive and hugely expensive upgrade and expansion of the state’s existing power distribution grid – is equally fraught with fancy.
Why? Because even the most ardent supporters of green power initiatives are profoundly uncomfortable with high- capacity transmission lines strutting across the landscape. Property owners in the path of power lines will predictably have issues as will those passionate about the fate of various species of wildlife, endangered or not. Using a metaphor that itself begs for extinction, a recent CNBC report observed that “building transmission lines in the U.S. is like herding cats”.
Still, time and civic aspirations march on, often with ludicrously ambitious timetables.
An April 17 article in the American Journal of Transportation quoted the Director of Development at the Humboldt Bay Harbor District as expecting the port to conclude its permitting process in 2024 and to begin construction of wind turbine facilities in 2027.
That may put the port in the position of being all dressed up with nowhere to go. Consider the timetables being identified by a key government agency for satisfying all of the relevant federal, state, tribal, county, municipal, and neighborhood authorities. A May 2023 California Energy Commission report scoping out the various regulatory hurdles estimated “it could take between 6 and 10 years for a project developer to obtain all the needed federal approvals, 4 to 6 years to obtain the state approvals, and 2 to 3 years to obtain local approvals before construction could begin”. And that’s to build structures that would be miles out to sea and conveniently out-of-sight.
Presumably, the paper chase would be pursued concurrently.
If the Energy Commission’s schedule seems excessively long, consider the state’s high-speed rail project. It’s now been four decades since then President Ronald Reagan proudly told the Japanese Diet in November 1983 that California, impressed by “your highly successful bullet train” would be building a high-speed rail link of its own between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Today, it’s still chugging its way through the Central Valley, a veritable piñata of political folly.
(Still, there may be an upside to the otherwise deplorable delays. By the long-off day the train finally pulls into San Francisco, people might actually want to again visit the City by the Bay.)
So, while ports understandably wish to capitalize on the largesse now being made available by federal and state electrification policies and programs, there is the danger that large components of the state’s electric power infrastructure may wind up sitting idle as the expanded transmission lines – the core of the system -- awaits completion.
Carts and horses, you know.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.
