One, the concept is untried on an industrial scale. Floating offshore wind turbines, which California believes will provide a full quarter of the state’s electric power by 2045, “is largely underdeveloped in the United States,” host Kevin Sliman says in an interview with two Penn State University Institute of Energy and the Environment professors.
“There’s a few kind of like one-off test turbines that are typically much smaller than what you would do on a fixed platform,” says Penn State professor Mark Miller, who admits he doesn’t know “of any existing farm of these anywhere.”
There are about 92,000 wind turbines of all types in the U.S., including those in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam, says the U.S. Energy Department. There are three operational offshore wind farms in the country, with more planned for development.
Yet, there are zero offshore wind turbines of the sort that California is banking on anywhere off the American coast.
California is focused on floating turbines out of necessity, if it is to produce enough renewable energy to shut down fossil fuel generation. The ocean floor falls so deeply just off the coast the standard fixed offshore turbines just won’t work. But it is prohibitively expensive to anchor a floating wind turbine to the bottom of the sea with cables in water deeper than 200 feet.
These drifting monsters would also be inviting targets for foreign agents to sabotage, and they can also break away on their own, endangering shipping lines and creating a unique problem for those who have to capture them when they’re on the loose.
Another puzzle to be solved for floating offshore wind development, in fact all offshore wind projects, is “a lack of U.S. wind turbine installation vessels,” says the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“Without access to these specialized vessels, developers must rely on other installation options like using barges and multiple tugboats which are expensive and logistically complex.”
2045 might seem a long way off. But that might be only three more governors down the line. It’s coming fast and the pieces and parts that need to fit together to meet the deadline are scattered.
The second hurdle is the election of Donald Trump. His administration might withhold federal funds for offshore wind projects. If he did, he would become even more unpopular in the state that disapproves of him more than all others with the exception of Vermont, but it brings up a question that needs to be asked:
Why should taxpayers in the rest of the country help finance California’s unnecessary rush to an all-renewables power grid?
A third hurdle is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s recent Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, which assessed “the potential biological, socioeconomic, physical, and cultural impacts that could result from floating offshore wind energy development in two wind energy areas (WEAs) offshore Humboldt and Morro Bay.”
Policy analyst David Wojick says the “statement is full of holes.”
“In fact,” he writes, “it specifically avoids those issues that justify cancelling the program.”
Some of the issues that go fully or partially unmentioned include: “staggering” costs; a lack of discussion in regard to the “systematic harassment of large numbers of endangered and protected species of whales and other animals”; as well as “a major non-acoustic form of harassment” that causes “behavioral change on a protected animal’s part.”
It seems environmentalists should have reservations about floating wind turbines equally as strong as the doubts from those who see the practical difficulties ahead. They have to decide if carbon dioxide is a bigger and more dangerous beast than a power system that adds to the stresses on the natural environment. They can’t have it both ways.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
