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California’s plans for offshore wind power run into Navy opposition

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Three of Deepwater Wind's turbines stand in the water off Block Island, Rhode Island.
Three of Deepwater Wind's turbines stand in the water off Block Island, Rhode Island.Michael Dwyer/Associated Press

As California pushes forward in its transition to clean energy, the state faces hard choices in its most futuristic initiative yet: offshore wind power.

State and federal officials are engaged in an intensive planning process for the first auction of zones for development of giant wind farms in the Pacific.

But right before the first auction was to be announced, opposition emerged from an unexpected source: the U.S. Navy. After a year and a half of public hearings and outreach by a state-federal task force, the Navy suddenly signaled in August that it would veto the ocean area off San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties that was expected for the first wind farms. What’s more, the Navy claimed the entire offshore zone stretching from Los Angeles north to Big Sur, comprising 36,000 square miles, saying it is needed for military testing and thus is off-limits to wind farms.

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The Navy’s move, which has not been publicly reported, makes little sense. After all, this vast area is already shared by commercial shipping, the fishing industry, offshore oil rigs and a wide variety of civilian maritime uses. The Trump administration, like the Obama administration, is supporting offshore wind development on the East Coast, so it has bipartisan support.

State and federal officials are negotiating with the Navy to find a solution. But if the Navy refuses to budge, state officials will need to switch to their designated Plan B — a series of potential areas off Sonoma, Humboldt and Del Norte counties, where the Navy has raised no objections. Although interconnection to the grid would be more difficult in these areas, they would be suitable for initial wind farm projects while negotiations continue farther south.

Offshore wind is not just another clean technology. As all mariners know, Pacific winds blow almost constantly, peaking in late afternoon and early evening. For that reason, offshore wind power would help solve California’s daily struggle of balancing its electricity grid as solar output surges at midday and vanishes at sunset, and it would be an alternative to the controversial plan to create a multistate grid for importing power from Wyoming and other Western states.

What makes California challenging for offshore wind is that unlike the shallow waters on the East Coast, where turbines can be fixed to the ocean floor, the deep waters off our coast require turbines to be on floating platforms. The world’s first floating wind farm, which began operating last month off Scotland, has turbines 577 feet high, and California’s probably will be bigger. This will create complex needs for manufacturing, logistics and maintenance — which in turn will require an extensive local supply chain.

As described in a new report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, this supply chain is unlikely to take root without an unprecedented, “high road” strategy for long-term planning. Such an approach would include major upgrades to ports, transportation and transmission, as well as legislative and regulatory action to direct utilities and community choice providers to consider offshore wind in their power acquisition plans for the 2020s. The result would be a new industry that provides high-wage jobs, benefits and career training, including for workers from disadvantaged communities.

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In Europe, where offshore wind is a major component of the energy grid, new manufacturing clusters at major ports have created tens of thousands of high-paying jobs in wind farm construction and marine operations. On the U.S. East Coast, labor unions and environmentalists have joined with state governments to plan for development of huge wind farms in the Atlantic.

Like other, much-vaunted clean-tech solutions of the future such as advanced batteries, offshore wind is not yet cost-competitive with existing power sources. But recent innovations in Europe have sent offshore wind costs into a fast decline that is expected to accelerate. Global investors are betting heavily that offshore wind will be fully competitive by the time full-scale deployment in California is possible in the 2020s.

None of this will happen in a vacuum. East Coast states are pressing forward, as are Europe, Japan and China. California, a climate leader in so many ways, is lagging behind on offshore wind. The Navy needs to be persuaded to get out of the way and allow California to start the hard work of catching up.

Robert Collier is a policy analyst at the Green Economy Program at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

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