Kerry JacksonEditor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire report, click here.
California has made a big bet on a technology to meet its self-imposed green energy target. It could work. Maybe. Might happen. If the real world matches the optimism. But there are challenging hurdles ahead.
One, the concept is untried on an industrial scale. Floating offshore wind turbines, which California believes will provide a full quarter of the state’s electric power by 2045, “is largely underdeveloped in the United States,” host Kevin Sliman says in an interview with two Penn State University Institute of Energy and the Environment professors.
“There’s a few kind of like one-off test turbines that are typically much smaller than what you would do on a fixed platform,” says Penn State professor Mark Miller, who admits he doesn’t know “of any existing farm of these anywhere.”
There are about 92,000 wind turbines of all types in the U.S., including those in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam, says the U.S. Energy Department. There are three operational offshore wind farms in the country, with more planned for development.
Yet, there are zero offshore wind turbines of the sort that California is banking on anywhere off the American coast.
California is focused on floating turbines out of necessity, if it is to produce enough renewable energy to shut down fossil fuel generation. The ocean floor falls so deeply just off the coast the standard fixed offshore turbines just won’t work. But it is prohibitively expensive to anchor a floating wind turbine to the bottom of the sea with cables in water deeper than 200 feet.
These drifting monsters would also be inviting targets for foreign agents to sabotage, and they can also break away on their own, endangering shipping lines and creating a unique problem for those who have to capture them when they’re on the loose.
Another puzzle to be solved for floating offshore wind development, in fact all offshore wind projects, is “a lack of U.S. wind turbine installation vessels,” says the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“Without access to these specialized vessels, developers must rely on other installation options like using barges and multiple tugboats which are expensive and logistically complex.”
2045 might seem a long way off. But that might be only three more governors down the line. It’s coming fast and the pieces and parts that need to fit together to meet the deadline are scattered.
The second hurdle is the election of Donald Trump.
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First, before we create more solar or wind projects, we need to figure out economic baseline and storage capacity. Without those, our electric system will brown out….which is fatal to industry and irritating to citizens. There is no evidence that our government has moved beyond political window dressing to actually address real energy resource management; as we expand electric vehicles and the demands of data centers dwarf the current available capacity.
Wind farms, floating or ground based, should be banned as they are unreliable,. over-priced and destructive of the environment and ecology where they exist. The future of electric generation lies in nuclear; scalable Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) such as Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR). Although the U.S. had a working MSR in the 1960’s at Oak Ridge, TN they chose to go the large reactor route and other countries, particularly China are now far ahead of the U.S. in MSR research and development.