In January 2016, Trident Winds, a small, Seattle-based wind company, submitted an unsolicited application to the U.S. Department of the Interior, laying out its aspirations to build a 1-gigawatt wind farm off Californiaâs central coast.
The scale was ambitious, especially for the United States. But Trident Windsâ chief executive officer, Alla Weinstein, sensed an opportunity.
âEffectively, thatâs what kickstarted the whole discussion on offshore wind in California,â Weinstein said of the application.
Years later, Californiaâs waters still have no finalized leases for the development of any offshore wind farms. Instead, the stateâs market has been bogged down by politics and technological hurdles.
But on Tuesday, the Biden administration and the state announced a target to hold an auction in mid-2022 to award leases for wind development off Californiaâs coast, a significant step towards encouraging the stateâs stalled market. The effort would contribute to the administrationâs recently-announced goal of reaching 30 gigawatts of offshore wind nationally by 2030, a target that seemed to favor the Northeast, which has already cultivated the foundations of a thriving offshore wind market. The United States currently has only about 42 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in operation.
Given Californiaâs leadership in clean energy and combating climate change, âitâs only fitting that California is totally unwilling to let the expansion weâre witnessing on the East Coast leave California behind,â said White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, on a Tuesday call with reporters highlighting the Biden administrationâs announcement.
California has many qualities that would seem to make it an enticing location to build offshore wind: high power prices, cities along the coast ready to use the electricity and a solar-saturated grid, which makes wind a complementary resource when the sun isnât shining. The state has more than 200 gigawatts of technical offshore wind potential, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, but current projections for offshore wind cast doubt on whether it can complete any projects in the next decade.
The state is now grappling with how to fit offshore wind into legislatively-mandated efforts to achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2045. Climate goals in numerous eastern states have hinged on significant offshore wind deployment, with plans to add more than 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035.
A recently-introduced California bill would also help invigorate the stateâs offshore wind market, directing energy regulators to establish offshore wind targets for 2030 and 2045. A similar bill is under consideration in Oregon, calling for up to 3 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The legislation, along with the federal administrationâs efforts to coax Californiaâs market forward, underscore the opportunity in Western waters, if politicians can seize it.
California has consistently been a frontrunner in clean energy deployments. Last month, a large swath of the state ran on 95 percent renewables for a brief four secondsâa milestone that reportedly sent chills of excitement down the spine of the state grid operatorâs chief executive officer.
Solar accounts for a majority of Californiaâs renewable resources, leaving an opening for a budding offshore wind market. Wind and solar work well together in an energy portfolio because wind generally continues to blow at night, while solar produces the most at the sunniest times of day. A 2021 report from the California Energy Commission suggested offshore wind should play a significant role in the stateâs clean energy targets, accounting for as much as 10 gigawatts of capacity additions in coming decades.
As California gets closer to carbon-free electricity, itâs increasingly seeing the need for a wider array of technologies to balance solar production. âThatâs where offshore wind fits in,â said Mohit Chhabra, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Councilâs climate and clean energy program.
California realized the potential for offshore wind years ago. Along with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which manages offshore leasing, the state launched an Offshore Renewable Energy Task Force back in 2016, several months after Trident Winds filed its application with the Interior Department.
The federal agency went on to select three possible lease zones, known as âcall areas,â off the California coast, and in 2018 asked companies to submit proposals for building in those areas. More than a dozen did, including some wind industry heavyweights like Avangrid Renewables and Norwegian oil major Equinor.
But since then, BOEM hasnât leased any of Californiaâs waters. The stateâs lucrative fishing industry worried that turbines would disrupt business, while the Defense Department raised concerns about the impact on training exercises off the coastâopposition that held up lease sales.
On Tuesday, the Biden administration said it had brokered a compromise on some of those issues. The Defense Department said it was committed to finding âcreative solutionsâ to advance offshore wind in California. Overall, the initial development areas could support up to 4.6 gigawatts of floating offshore wind, according to the administration.
âWe at the Defense Department are satisfied that thereâs not a trade-off between the clean energy goals of this endeavor and our military readiness,â said Dr. Colin Kahl, the under secretary of defense for policy, on the Tuesday call with press.
Holding lease sales is just one step in the extended process to begin building offshore wind farms, however. Project developers must also secure dozens of permits and survive government review to move forward.
Vineyard Wind, a project off the coast of Massachusetts, just won final federal approval in May. Its developers submitted plans to the government in 2017. A project planned for Lake Erie was proposed over a decade ago. The countryâs first offshore wind project, Rhode Islandâs Block Island, came online in 2016. Many more projects are now under federal review.
That pace makes both the administrationâs 2030 target and aspirations to build offshore wind off Californiaâs coast in the next decade âa stretch,â said Oliver Metcalf, head of U.S. wind research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The research firm expects the United States to add just 23 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, with no projects off the coast of California by that year.
âCalifornia Open For Businessâ
The Westâs challenges go beyond politics; the regionâs deep waters require the use of floating offshore wind technology, where a buoyant platform is moored to the seafloor. Floating wind is currently more expensive and less common than fixed-bottom offshore wind, which is affixed to the ocean floor and could be used in much of the East Coastâs shallower waters.
Floating projects installed worldwide represented less than 100 megawatts combined at the end of 2019, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and most were pilot projects. Equinor, one of the companies that submitted a proposal to build off the coast of California, has one floating commercial project in operation off the coast of Scotland and another in the works in the Norwegian North Sea.
Bloomberg forecasts the buildout of just 6.3 gigawatts of floating offshore wind worldwide by 2030, compared to about 200 gigawatts of fixed offshore wind projects.
But the Biden administrationâs Tuesday announcement bodes well for future development. NREL analysis suggests commercial floating projects could technically land in California waters as early as the mid-2020s, with costs dropping an estimated 44 percent between 2019 and 2032. Technology advancements and commercial growth driven by planned projects in Europe and Asia will also help the West Coast market.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom included $20 million for offshore wind development in his 2021-2022 budget request.
And Castle Wind, a joint venture Trident Winds entered into in 2018 with German power provider EnBW, has negotiated a âmutual benefits agreementâ with the local fishing community near one of the California call areas, possibly curtailing the type of controversy that has dogged other offshore projects.
Assemblymember David Chiu, who introduced the California bill, hopes to seize on the momentum. The legislation, he said, âwill let the country and the rest of the world know that California is open for business in this space.â
Some utilities and renewables developers are equally bullish. Castle Wind has already inked a tentative supply agreement with power provider Central Coast Community Energy. Weinstein, of Trident, hoped for a lease sale in 2021, but believes the state can execute on development by 2030.
âI have no doubt that it can be done,â said Weinstein. âIf there is a will, which I think the will is there, then yeah, we can find a way to do it.â
Metcalf, of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, agrees that offshore wind in the West âdoes seem to be a question of when, rather than if.â But it remains unclear if the timeline will align with the administrationâs splashy target.
That 2030 target âis truly a national goal,â said Jocelyn Brown-Saracino, the offshore wind lead at the Department of Energyâs (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office. To nudge along progress on the West Coast, the department has invested more than $100 million in research on and development of floating offshore wind. Itâs working with BOEM to gather data in California waters and funding floating offshore wind demonstrations off the East Coast, with the expectation that what it learns will translate to the West. In 2019, DOE launched a program to design âradically newâ floating wind turbines.
As soon as auctions happen, Tridentâs Weinstein said, âthen we can move.â
âI think at this point, weâre on the verge of seeing significant movement in California,â she said. âThis is the beginning of a much longer path to the expansion of offshore wind.â
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