This week, dozens of companies are expected to compete for the right to lease the first commercial wind power sites off the coast of California in a federal online auction that could kick-start the state’s next clean energy boom.
Collectively, the winners will pay at least tens of millions of dollars for exclusive rights to submit plans to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for wind turbines at five sites that stretch across more than 370,000 acres of the Pacific. Three of the areas are clustered near Morro Bay along the central coast, starting about 20 miles due west from the picturesque seaside town of Cambria. Two more are located off Humboldt County in the north.
Annual average wind speeds around the Morro Bay sites reach 8 to 10 meters per second, exceeding those around some large offshore wind farms already developed in the North Sea. Towering turbines on the locations up for lease could deliver 4.5 gigawatts of clean electricity to the California grid, enough to power more than 1.5 million homes.
The state has an even more ambitious goal: building 25 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2045. That’s equivalent to nearly a third of the state’s total generating capacity today, or enough to power 25 million homes.
But the audacious plans for offshore wind face a daunting geological challenge: the continental shelf drops steeply just a few miles off the California coast. That makes it prohibitively expensive to erect standard offshore wind turbines, which are set atop fixed structures that extend to the seafloor. 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.
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