Many thanks to the Econews team for such a good update on the windfarms.
California wants offshore wind farms like the ones on the English Sea between Harwich UK and Rotterdam that are inspiring to see. Large turbines with foundations in the 100-200 foot deep waters are working fine. That area has utilized all sorts of existing resources including harbor space, shipbuilding operations, steel mills, iron mines, steel fabrication capacity, and high tech companies to create these windfarms. All of those industries have kept the costs down and the carbon footprints reasonable for windfarms.
California’s goal of 25 Gigawatts (GW) capacity calls for just over 2,000 massive turbines. The turbines along the coast will be in water between 2,000 and 3,000 feet deep. Just the foundations, towers and anchors for each of these huge turbines are around 10,000 tons of steel compared to around 1,500 ton foundations on the ones in Europe. With almost no steel refining anywhere near California, the chances of the necessary steel coming from Europe or Asia is pretty high.
But – California and Oregon are planning windfarms many times the size of any on the planet. California has almost none of the prerequisites listed above except high tech companies. This means creating six or more industries with high carbon footprints. The question becomes whether the low carbon energy produced will offset this carbon footprint in time to help counteract the extreme weather activity tied to GHG’s.
The Europe is primarily replacing coal burning power plants. Here, with the already clean California grid, it is the localized natural gas burning plants being offset by wind. That carbon reduction to our grid would be much lower than the reduction to a coal powered grid situation.
When you add all of this up, it becomes a huge carbon footprint.
Photo: Untrakdrover, Wikimedia CC.
The goal of 25 GW of offshore wind farms is one massive project that needs to be evaluated as a WHOLE in terms of its impact. It would be good if there was a scientific review of all these parameters but such studies seem few and far between and mostly dated ten years ago before things got this huge. The big question being, will it actually mitigate the climate crisis in the next two decades or make it worse?
This project is being moved forward one small piece at a time. It started locally with the proposal of a dozen turbines for Humboldt when the reality is 2,000 just for California. It starts in our Bay with one mile of docks when the reality in the EU is that the ports are using ten miles of docks. Is this the death by a thousand cuts strategy for disarming any opposition? Or is it a Machiavellian seduction strategy!
What will keep Humboldt Bay from being overwhelmed by this carbon intense project?
The year 2023 has shown how extreme weather is becoming a critical issue NOW. Do we really want to add this list of huge carbon footprint industries to what is going on at this critical juncture?
Keep up the good work. Appreciatively
Russell Sydney
McKinleyville