Smart Siting Crucial For California Ocean Wind

Will the Navy sink plans for wind farms off Morro Bay?

John Lindt, January 26, 2018 (The Tribune)

“In response to growing interest in developing wind farms off California, the Navy in August published a map that shows where [floating] wind-energy projects and Navy and Marine Corps operations would overlap…The Navy had been asked to weigh in on the wind-power idea by the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The agency serves as a gatekeeper for energy development 3 miles offshore and beyond and had received [competitive requests from an Trident Winds for a 650-to 1,000-megawatt floating wind farm, and Statoil Wind US]…[BOEM] is working with the state of California on planning…[The Navy map designated about 36,000 square miles of Southern and Central California, from the Mexico border to just shy of Monterey Bay,] as a red zone, meaning the construction of wind farms in those sectors was ‘not compatible’ with Navy operations…

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The California coastline offers 112 gigawatts of technical offshore wind resource potential, much of it from floating turbines, according to Trident. That is more than 50 Diablo Canyons — about 1.5 times the state’s electric energy consumption…If the Navy sticks to its guns and blocks wind-energy projects off the coast of both Southern and Central California, the winner may be Humboldt Bay, where BOEM has also studied potential wind projects, colored green on the Navy map…The global offshore wind energy market was valued at $20.3 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $57.2 billion in 2022, growing 16.2 percent from 2017 and 2022…UC Berkeley policy analyst Rob Collier says that because of supply chain needs for floating wind technology, the industry will be a huge boon to wherever the staging area is for the mammoth 700-foot-tall turbines that could and should be built nearby, not imported from China or elsewhere…” click here for more

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