Old lumber port preps for new life as California offshore wind hub

"Offshore wind will be a complete revitalization of the port," Oetker said. "We're focusing on an industry that we think is going to position it for the 21st century — we're building a new port facility from scratch that's going to be here for the next 50 to a 100 years."

Realistically, construction will start in 2025 and will take two or three years, Oetker said. The project will require an investment of several hundred millions of dollars in federal, state and private sector funding, and is expected to create as many as 3,000 jobs during its construction phase.

Humboldt Bay, however, isn't the only California port that has shown interest in becoming the staging hub for the offshore wind industry. This week, the Port of Long Beach announced a proposal to build a 400-acre floating offshore wind facility in its outer harbor.

“Imagine fully assembled wind turbines capable of generating 20 megawatts of energy towed by sea from the Port of Long Beach to offshore wind farms in Central and Northern California,” Mario Cordero, the port's executive director said. “No other location has the space to achieve the economies of scale needed to drive down the cost of energy for these huge turbines."

A January report by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management found that aside from Humboldt Bay, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach would be good candidates for the staging and integration sites where the foundations and the turbines will be assembled, given that all three ports have large amounts of available land, deep navigation channels and no draft restrictions to tow the assembled turbines out to sea.

The report also noted that given California's ambitious offshore wind goals, at least three staging and integration sites will be necessary to assemble the needed turbines. The bureau expects to release an additional report in late June that will rank the California ports, based on the feasibility and costs of the needed infrastructure upgrades to support the offshore wind industry, including assembly, manufacturing, and maintenance.

This past August, California set a target of adding 5 gigawatts of offshore wind energy to its renewable energy portfolio by 2030, as it phases out carbon-based power, and 25 gigawatts by 2045, enough electricity to power 25 million homes. The planned offshore wind farms in Northern and Central California will have a potential capacity of 4.6 gigawatts.

The state is home to some of the best offshore wind resources in the country, according to the California Energy Commission, and offshore wind is a critical clean energy source at night complementing solar energy by providing generation at the end of the day and into the evening as the sun sets. 

"Offshore is expected to be a core component of California’s long-term energy profile as we move away from fossil fuels," CEC spokesman Michael Ward said. "While there are some uncertainties as to how this capacity will be developed through 2045, we know it can be done."

It's only in recent years that large-scale deployment of floating wind turbines, which are held in place by cables anchored to the seafloor rather than by fixed foundations sitting on the seabed, has become economically feasible. The first wind farm using this technology was built off the coast of Scotland and started operating in 2017. A second floating wind off Scotland was completed in 2021, and there's also one off the Portuguese coast that went online in 2020.

Among the advantages of floating wind turbines is that they can sit further out in the ocean, where they are less likely to ruin the view from the shore and where the wind is typically stronger than closer to land.

"The biggest barrier to deployment of offshore wind energy in California is to get the industry up and running as opposed to technological challenges," said Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst with Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank. "That includes everything from port infrastructure to transmission line infrastructure, to bring the power onshore as well as to transmit it throughout the state."

Humboldt Bay has among the best wind speeds along the California coast, which makes it an ideal location for the wind farms, but it is nowhere near the main concentrations of electricity users in the state. So, both to bring the power from the turbines on shore and to distribute it will require an substantial infrastructure investment.

The U.S. is already lagging behind other nations in more established fixed-bottom offshore wind technology, with 55-gigawatt in capacity already being deployed globally, specifically in countries such as China, Germany, and the United Kingdom, according to Energy Innovation. As of last year, the U.S. had only two offshore wind farms, a 30-megawatt one in Rhode Island and a 12-megawatt one in Virginia.

Given the experience European developers already have with offshore wind, it may not be surprising that the federal auction of the leases off the California coast attracted interest from those developers, with affiliates of a German and a Danish company snapping up the two leases near Humboldt Bay.

But whether a U.S. or an European company will lead a project doesn't in itself present an issue, Solomon said.

"The bigger priority for the federal and state governments is to keep the supply chain and the workforce local," she said, citing the credits developers received in the bidding process for their commitments to local workforce development. "One of the advantages of offshore wind is that, since the turbines are so big, a lot of the work has to be done near the site of the project."

Follow @edpettersson

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