California has big plans for offshore wind. However, because the continental shelf drops steeply the turbines will be floating. The MIT Technology Review has an article on the difficulties of the enormous task. One hopes the project goes better than the California high-speed rail project.
The state has an even more ambitious goal: building 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2045…The turbines built near Morro Bay and off Humboldt, where water depths reach up to 1,300 meters (around 4,300 feet), will need to be placed on floating platforms, a speculative and very costly technology. Some companies have begun using such platforms, which are tethered to the sea bottom on moorings, in places such as the coasts of Portugal and Scotland. But these sites still produce relatively little power. To meet its ambitious plans, California will need to develop sprawling fleets of these floating wind turbines very quickly…
But there are enormous engineering and regulatory challenges ahead. Achieving California’s targets could require creating or upgrading ports, constructing new vessels, streamlining permitting processes, building up a West Coast wind manufacturing sector, and shifting to new types of platforms that could be cheaper to deliver and install. And all of that would have to occur at an incredibly rapid pace…
For now, however, floating wind power remains hugely expensive. It’s hard to put precise figures on the technology today, given the small pool of projects across different regions, but the levelized cost is roughly $200 per megawatt-hour…Standard offshore wind, land-based wind projects and large-scale solar farms run around $80, $30 and $35 per megawatt-hour, respectively…
In addition to the high costs, any US floating wind development will also have to grapple with some onerous regulations…California faces still more challenges. Many of the state’s ports are too shallow and its bridges too low to accommodate the giant turbines, towers, and platforms, which are far easier to assemble before they’re carried to the offshore site…
In addition, it could cost tens of billions of dollars to develop the electricity transmission capacity needed to plug all the envisioned offshore wind turbines into the grid. California’s Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s main electricity network, found that just accommodating four gigawatts of electricity from the sites near Humboldt County could cost between $5 and $8 billion.
Finally, there’s the question of permitting…
DB2