Here’s what California’s offshore wind industry might look like
Here’s what California’s offshore wind industry might look like
Near the mouth of the Port of Long Beach is a giant, empty square of calm ocean water. It doesn’t look like much now, especially in the context of the nation’s largest port complex. But if things go as planned, it’ll be ground zero for California’s offshore wind industry and for floating turbines in the United States.
The state recently decided on a plan to build hundreds of turbines off of the coast, and in November, its voters will decide whether to approve a bond that would help fund those turbines. Pilot projects in Europe have demonstrated that the technology is feasible, but it’s never been tried at this scale.
“Even as we look out here in our outer harbor, it is hard to get a good perspective on the scale,” said Suzanne Plezia, chief harbor engineer at the Port of Long Beach.
The port’s plan is called Pier Wind, and it would take up roughly 300 football fields of space. Half of it would be a staging area where the turbine puzzle pieces would be delivered and assembled. The other half would be a wet storage area, where the fully assembled turbines would sit, waiting for the towboats and calm seas needed to get them to their final destinations. All of this is behind a breakwater that keeps the ocean calm enough for this work. The turbines would be a thousand feet tall, like the Eiffel Tower. Not a lot of facilities can accommodate that.
“We have this large area in our outer harbor where we can build a new facility that is out in front of our bridge, so there’s no air height restrictions. We have direct access to the open ocean here with those deep, wide channels,” Plezia said.
Plezia said this project would employ 17,000 people, and by the time it would be up and running in 2031, it could send out one assembled turbine every week.
These turbines would be particularly valuable because of when they produce energy.
“The characteristics of the wind, which are the strongest in the late afternoon and evening, which is exactly when solar drops off, when the sun goes down and electricity demand is the highest,” said Adam Stern, executive director of the trade group Offshore Wind California.
To those who are worried about the ocean view and the birds, these would be dozens of miles from the shore, far from where the birds like to hang out.
“They hardly can be seen, except on the clearest of days, when they’ll look like toothpicks in the distance,” Stern said.
Those toothpicks would be unlike any turbine we’ve seen in the U.S., in part because they’re really, really big.
“One rotation of one of these turbines can power two houses for a day,” said California Energy Commission Chair David Hochschild.
Compared to the onshore turbines you find in the California desert, these would stand twice as tall and generate roughly 10 times the power. Then there’s the fact that they float on a tripod.
“It really enables the deployment of the infrastructure in waters that were previously considered sort of off limits,” Hochschild said.
On the East Coast, the turbines are fixed in the seabed, hundreds of feet beneath the surface. On the West Coast, seabeds are thousands of feet down.
The state’s goal is for wind to produce about 25 gigawatts of power by 2045. That will be vital in achieving California’s overall goal to run on nothing but clean energy by then.
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