Environment California director on what it takes to bring agencies together for west coast offshore wind

Even with call area identifications and a potential mandate in the California legislature, offshore wind in the west is just getting started.

A report, Offshore Wind for America, released today from Environment American, took a look at the potential for the offshore wind data nationwide. For the West Coast, the report found that in California, offshore wind has the potential to provide 157 percent of the state’s total energy use in 2019. Using electricity use data from the same year, it has the potential to produce 1057 percent in Hawaii, 457 percent in Oregon and 161 percent in Washington.

Laura Deehan, state director of Environment California, said the report is meant to show the sheer amount of potential for offshore wind, which many states have yet to explore fully.

“There’s just incredible untapped potential off of the West Coast for offshore wind, and we’re not accessing any of it yet,” Deehan said. “We’ve not even started.”

For California, 2020 was supposed to be a big year for offshore winds. Industry representatives and stakeholders had hopes of a decision following an RFI for the BOEM call areas, or potentially additional area selections. But BOEM has yet to take any action since 2019, when it identified Humboldt Bay, Morro Bay and Diablo Canyon as potential offshore wind project sites.

In 2021, Deehan said the biggest goal is the potential passing of AB 525, a bill that mandates 3 GW of offshore wind builds by 2030 and 10 GW by 2040. Deehan said the bill would direct all state agencies to begin the planning for offshore wind and identify any potential problem areas that could come up in the road ahead. The bill is currently in the Committee of Utilities and Energy and the Committee on Natural Resources in the state legislature.

“The first thing that needs to happen is all of these different agencies that are thinking about these different factors should be coming to the table and laying out their concerns and making a plan for how we can overcome all those hurdles and how we can get to the clean energy targets that are so needed,” Deehan told NPM.

But, as found in the report, Deehan said that offshore resources in California could go so much further than the 10 GW goal once there’s enough support to really begin the process.

“That’s really only a small slice of the total capacity we could access and so we’re confident that there’s more than enough sea space to get 10 GW off the coast of California in a way that addresses all of the other real concerns [about offshore],” Deehan said.

But AB 525 is not the only government acknowledgement of the offshore wind industry. The California Energy Commission’s SB 100 report, released earlier this week, also found that including offshore wind would help lower the costs of meeting the state’s 100 percent renewable by 2045 goal.

“[We must catch] up to some of our friends in other parts of the world where they’ve gone so much further in tapping into this clean, renewable offshore wind...” Deehan said. “We have this massive coastline with so much sea space, we really need to start the process of getting some of that clean energy into our energy portfolio.”