California is relying heavily on offshore wind to take it to the nirvana of a carbon-neutral power grid in 2045. Sacramento believes so intensely in the concept that lawmakers recently introduced a bill that would allow voters to decide in the fall of 2024 if a $1 billion bond should be issued “to support activities related to the development of offshore wind energy generation.” That’s quite a sum for a project based more on political whimsy than the real world.
It’s a foolish gamble, yet it’s one that others are eager to make. Washington, for instance, approved a new wind project off the Massachusetts coast that supposedly will replace the generating power lost after a coal-fired plant was shut down in 2017. Any optimism should be tempered, though. California’s green “lead” will take the Bay State into the ditch.
California’s plans call for offshore wind farms to produce 25% (or 25 gigawatts, enough power for 25 million homes) of electricity by 2045. The state Energy Commission is in full-faith mode, expecting the sea breezes to “play a major role in helping the state achieve 100 percent clean electricity and carbon neutrality.”
Critics have described the 2045 target as a fantasy, crazy, the product of magic thinking, a war on the poor, risky, impractical and a return to the Stone Age. They’re all probably correct.
As of today, there are no offshore wind turbines in California. Building enough of what is inarguably experimental will require the state to do what it hasn’t done in decades, and that’s complete a large-scale public works project.
The state’s 20th century “we’ll build that” mentality continues to crash hard into 21st century reality, in which grand plans are dragged down by thorny environmental laws, encumbering labor rules, a growing labyrinth of codes, bureaucratic dysfunction, low-ball initial cost projections and third-rate leadership.
Yet California presses on as if the conditions of the 1960s infrastructure boom under Gov. Pat Brown were still in effect.
Today, in “small is beautiful” California, the state’s offshore wind plans are, according to MIT Technology Review senior editor James Temple, “audacious” and present “a daunting geological challenge.”
Costs are another hurdle over which “progress” will stumble. While near the coast the seabed is near the surface, just a few miles out the continental shelf drops steeply. Building a wind farm on structures fixed to the ocean floor in water deeper than 200 feet would be “prohibitively expensive,” says Temple. Because of this, nearly all of the turbines will have to be of the floating variety roughly 20 miles out, an alternative that itself is “very costly” and “speculative,” according to Temple.
“California,” he says, is “pinning a lot of hopes on an industry that scarcely exists today.”
Across the country, in another blue state where policymakers are recklessly and myopically trying to jettison fossil fuels, customers are already seeing higher power bills.
“The cost to consumers of two offshore wind projects expected to support New York’s self-imposed climate goals has more than doubled from their original estimates, which were high to begin with,” says the Institute for Energy Research.
The increased costs have put a damper on the state’s ambition, which is to produce 9,000 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, as capital has become scarce.
“While New York has secured eight offshore wind contracts for development, energy experts say not enough investment is being made in the port infrastructure needed to assemble the wind turbines and deploy them out to sea,” City Limits reported in late December.
Inflation has also run up expenses that were breathtaking from the start. Citing unexpected costs, some developers that had contracts to build East Coast offshore wind farms have bailed out. One, Orsted, chose a $4 billion writedown rather than continue.
To reel them back in, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul gave the companies a chance to rework their budgets and rebid their contracts, says City Limits.
And they did. But what’s to stop them from bolting when the next wave of adversity arrives?
Meanwhile, Sacramento’s sovereigns continue to demand that Californians hand them a network that won’t be able deliver on the timetable they’ve set. So now might be time to prepare for the coming blackouts. Because in four years, gasoline-powered back-up generators that will keep the lights on will have been banned by the same people who are bringing back the Stone Age.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.