Inland empireboat lifts generator#Those winds spin three steel blades, which feed a generator at the top of the tower that creates electricity. To generate power, offshore turbines are placed facing into the wind. While those lighter winds, along with military interests and heavy port traffic, mean Southern California’s coast isn’t prime real estate for offshore wind projects, there is a chance some farms could one day be located several miles offshore, where winds are a bit stronger.Īnd as offshore wind farms come online further up the coast of California, it means a new source of relief for everyone reliant on the Golden State’s strained energy grid is on the horizon. “Once you go south of the Channel Islands, the wind energy resource drops off rapidly,” said Walt Musial, an engineer heading up the offshore wind program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. That doesn’t mean Southern California’s coastal waters will be dotted with turbines. Windy stretches of open ocean off the coast of Morro Bay and Humboldt are going to auction in late fall, for lease to interested wind farm developers. more than 50,000 megawatts of fixed-bottom offshore turbines.īut with new goals and incentives in place, California soon could be home to the nation’s first two commercial floating wind farms. Globally, just 100 megawatts of floating offshore wind has been deployed, including three commercial farms in the United Kingdom and Portugal, vs. That’s why no commercial-scale floating offshore wind power projects have been built in the United States to date. If offshore wind farms were built in every body of water where wind speeds make such projects viable, the Department of Energy estimates that those projects alone would generate twice as much total energy as the United States now produces.Įngineers still are working to make floating offshore wind structures more stable and cost effective, though. Instead, wind turbines must be mounted on floating platforms anchored to the seabed with flexible mooring lines and chains. Once water gets deeper than 60 meters, fixed-bottom platforms become impractical and costly. But two-thirds of America’s offshore wind energy potential lies in deeper waters, such as the steep continental shelves found a few miles off the West Coast and the Gulf of Maine. Wind turbines can be anchored to the sea floor in shallow waters off Europe, most of the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Then, in September, the Biden Administration announced it was expanding earlier offshore wind energy goals with incentives specifically aiming at bolstering deep water projects. That would be enough electricity to power 3.75 million homes over the next seven years and 25 million homes by mid-century. In August, the California Energy Commission set goals of installing offshore wind projects that could generate 2,000 to 5,000 megawatts by 2030 and 25,000 megawatts by 2045. Just two have come online in the United States, with five turbines off the coast of Rhode Island and two near Virginia able to produce 42 megawatts of fossil-free electricity for nearby residents.Īnd though California has almost twice as much coastline as the Netherlands, where nine large offshore wind farms are drumming up energy around the clock, no wind farms have been developed yet along the coast of the Golden State. Southern Californians are accustomed to seeing wind turbines lining the hills off the 10 freeway in the Coachella Valley. Those farms are home to nearly 6,000 turbines capable of generating 28,363 megawatts of power, which meet 3% of Europe’s energy needs. There are now 123 such farms off the coast of 13 European countries, according to data from. With offshore wind stronger and more consistent than wind on land, climate-minded European governments have been subsidizing clean energy offshore wind farms since the 1990s. Fly into Amsterdam and, just before landing, you’ll pass over row after row of bright white wind turbines sprouting up from the North Sea.
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