Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director
Big money for offshore wind has started rolling in: At the end of January, Representative Jared Huffman visited Humboldt Bay to announce $426 million in infrastructure funding had been awarded to the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Conservation and Recreation District for the proposed offshore wind and heavy lift marine terminal. For many of us on the North Coast who have been following the developing offshore wind industry, this proposed project on Humboldt Bay has been the most obvious thing to watch as it’s right here in front of us, but it’s just one piece of the massive infrastructure project that is being proposed for our area.
The different aspects of this project (the wind farms themselves, the associated port development, and the transmission lines that will be necessary to bring electricity to consumers), the various jurisdictions and agencies who will be in charge of permitting (there is a smorgasbord of federal, state and local agencies), the companies involved, and the long permitting timelines all make it difficult for the average person to keep up with all the moving parts. Although the various pieces of this proposed development will take years to work through the permitting processes, we wanted to give EcoNews readers a general lay of the land at this particular moment so they are better positioned to monitor this development and engage in the process in the years to come. This will be a marathon, not a sprint, but due to the size of the project and all of the unknowns, it’s important that we all take the time to educate ourselves now and get ready to advocate for what we think is important when it comes to renewable energy development in our region.
The Big Picture
The State of California has a goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2045, which the California Energy Commission has translated to a goal of 5 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind by 2030 and 25 GW by 2045. The Biden administration has set a lofty offshore wind production goal of 30 GW by 2030, which, along with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), set the stage for the current proposals off the coast of California. The Humboldt Wind Energy Area (Humboldt WEA), approximately 20 miles off the coast of Humboldt County, is one of the first areas that the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) put up for lease for wind energy development. The Morro Bay Wind Area is the other. The Humboldt WEA currently has two lease areas in it, the Morro Bay WEA has three.
Offshore wind energy production will involve 3 components: the turbines that generate electricity, the wind terminal facility in Humboldt Bay where the turbines would be constructed and stored until they are towed offshore, and the transmission lines that will get the electricity from the wind farm back to shore and on to consumers. Although all of these pieces are dependent on each other and none would be happening without the others, they are being looked at as three distinct projects with different permitting agencies and timelines.
The Farms
The actual turbines will be installed in the approximately 206 square mile Humboldt WEA, located 20 miles off the coast in federal waters. Because of the depth of the ocean floor in this area (from 500 to 1,300 meters deep), the turbines proposed would be on floating platforms that are tethered to the ocean floor with mooring lines, either cables or chains. In December of 2022 BOEM announced that two companies had won the bidding process to lease and start developing the Humboldt WEA: RWE and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners collectively bid $331.5 million for the rights to develop and operate wind farms. The developers estimate that the Humboldt WEA projects could produce up to 2.6 GW of energy.
According to its website, RWE Clean Energy “operates a renewable energy portfolio of about 8 gigawatts (GW) installed capacity of onshore wind, solar, and battery storage, making it the number four renewable energy company in the U.S.” It is a subsidiary of RWE Group which has long been a target of climate activists due to its burning of coal and destruction of forests and villages in Germany to mine lignite coal, an action which has been protested by forest defenders and residents of nearby villages. RWE Group is also being sued by a Peruvian farmer seeking to hold it responsible for its contributions to climate change and the impacts to Peruvian glaciers. RWE Group now says it plans to phase out coal by 2030.
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, whose local wind energy project goes by Vineyard Wind (a nod to its East Coast wind farm at Martha’s Vineyard which is poised to be the first utility-scale offshore wind project in the US), is “a fund manager that invests in large-scale and complex greenfield renewable energy infrastructure projects in high-growth, middle-income markets with strong fundamentals for renewable development and significant impact potential.”
This portion of the project is in federal waters and will be permitted under the National Environmental Quality Act (NEPA). On February 20, BOEM wrapped up the scoping period for its Notice of Intent to Prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to analyze the potential impacts of offshore wind development off the West Coast. It is now in the process of preparing the PEIS, which is not related to a specific project since neither developer has submitted plans for its lease area, but is a more high-level document to assess potential impacts of West Coast offshore wind development in general. Through this process BOEM hopes to identify potential mitigation measures that lessees might adopt or that BOEM may require as conditions of approval.
Although BOEM’s jurisdiction is the Outer Continental Shelf, the PEIS will analyze land-side environmental and socio-economic impacts as well. Many local environmental groups, including the NEC, submitted scoping comments to BOEM asking it to analyze potential impacts to marine mammals, migration patterns, sea birds, ocean upwelling (and the potential cumulative impacts to upwelling by multiple projects), transmission (including landfall sites), effects of underwater infrastructure, housing, transportation, tribal cultural sites, and habitat changes due to port development among other concerns.
One of the questions that many locals have is how to measure the trade-offs associated with renewable energy development, specifically how much impact is acceptable to counter the impacts of climate change, including warming seas and ocean acidification. This is why it’s important for BOEM to analyze the cumulative, direct and indirect, impacts from this development and balance those impacts against the potential environmental benefits of the wind energy to be generated.
Meanwhile, the developers are in the Site Assessment phase of the project, meaning they must submit a Site Assessment Plan to BOEM for approval before engaging in studies and planning for the lease areas. This portion of the process is estimated to take around five years. The developers then submit a Construction and Operations Plan, which is the plan specific to their proposed project that will then undergo environmental review under NEPA. That process is expected to take around three years.
The Port
This is the piece of the offshore wind puzzle that most locals are familiar with. To recap, the Humboldt Bay Harbor District is proposing to redevelop a roughly 180 acre former mill site on the Samoa Peninsula into a heavy lift terminal to support the west coast offshore wind industry (see Humboldt Waterkeeper on page __ for more information on the site). Humboldt Bay was chosen as a site for this development not only due to proximity to the Humboldt WEA, but also because a port feasibility study “California Floating Offshore Wind Regional Ports Assessment” published by BOEM in January of 2023 identified Humboldt Bay as the one “port” in California capable of all three aspects of offshore wind activities: Manufacturing and Fabrication, Staging and Integration, and Operations and Maintenance.
One of the aspects of our Bay that makes it desirable to BOEM is the lack of vertical obstruction. The turbines that are being proposed would potentially be as tall as Eiffel Tower and would be assembled at the terminal and towed out to the WEA. So the Port of Richmond, for example, would not work for this since the Golden Gate Bridge would get in the way. The Harbor District is in the process of preparing a Draft Environmental Impact Report for the proposed terminal and it ambitiously estimates that the permitting process will wrap up in 2025.
In October of 2022 the Harbor District signed an exclusive right to negotiate a lease with Crowley Wind Services, LLC to build and operate the wind terminal. By the time you are reading this, a lease may have been signed as that agreement expires at the end of March. Many local organizations (including the NEC) and local tribes have expressed concern about Crowley due to allegations of sex trafficking brought against employees on the east coast, as well as sexual harassment allegations against the former vice president of wind services. In response to these revelations, the Yurok Tribe released a report entitled “How to Protect Native Women, Girls, and People in Humboldt & Del Norte County as Offshore Wind Enters the Region” which examines how to prevent incidents of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) and sex trafficking during a development boom. Many organizations have called on the Harbor District to address concerns raised by the community about the developer and the project by making clear and binding commitments to transparency, communication and community governance and decision making, and ensure that the concerns of the community are heard, addressed and enshrined in the lease with any developer.
The Transmission
Arguably, none of the rest of this development makes any sense without transmission lines, which may end up being the biggest part of this process. Transmission lines include the lines bringing the power to shore from the wind farm, as well as the lines connecting to the current grid and bringing electricity to consumers. As reported by Elena Bilheimer in the July 2023 issue of EcoNews, the grid in Humboldt County currently does not have capacity to transmit the amount of energy expected to be produced by this project, so extensive upgrades will be necessary. The California Independent Systems Operator (CAISO), the entity that manages the electrical grid in California, has proposed a couple of options: connecting to and upgrading the current land-based transmission infrastructure, or constructing an undersea cable that will take power directly to the Bay Area for distribution. Either option is expensive and takes time, and of course there are a variety of environmental impacts associated with both.
The Schatz Energy Center report “Northern California and Southern Oregon Offshore Wind Transmission Study” warns that offshore wind development can provide “reliability benefits to OSW “host” communities and communities along transmission routes, provided that the new infrastructure includes connections to the local systems that serve these communities. However, it is also possible for the new infrastructure to bypass rural communities if local connections are not included.” The study outlines possible routes and constraints (including Marine Protected Areas and undersea canyons, Tribal areas, state and national parks), and also repeatedly states that the technology in question is still in development.
Large-scale transmission projects usually take a decade or more to be developed and the scenarios analyzed by Schatz come with big price tags: an estimated $2 billion for the over-land route and $5 billion for the undersea route. The permitting agencies that will be involved in this process depend on what route(s) are chosen. We’ll be following that process, so keep an eye out in EcoNews for updates as this unfolds.
So how are we all feeling about this?
Although at this point we have consensus in the environmental community about the dire need to transition away from fossil fuels, opinions about this particular project range from ecstatic support to firm opposition, and all points in between. One thing we hear a lot at the NEC is, “I support renewable energy, but I have a lot of questions about this project.” A big concern for many is simply all of the unknowns. The technology in question is still in development and these would be the very first developments of offshore wind farms on the West Coast, so we don’t have anything to compare them to. Add to that the fact that the area 20 miles off the coast is not as well studied as the near shore environment, making it difficult to predict the impacts to sea life since we don’t have as much baseline data.
So the challenge before us right now is to think about what we want renewable energy development to look like in our region. What do we value about the North Coast that we want to protect or improve? What are the possible impacts of this development? What are the possible impacts if it doesn’t happen? What are the possibilities for addressing climate change and transforming our systems that we aren’t even exploring because so much effort and money is going into simply transitioning from one power source to another while we still continue to engage in destructive behaviors and systems as a society? One factor that is high in the minds of NEC staff is the fact that, once again, we are putting power (literally) in the hands of giant corporations and investment firms when the problems that are facing the environment come largely from the capitalist system and the prioritization of profit over the actual needs of the people. How could we do this differently?
One thing is certain: We have an immense responsibility as one of the first proposals on the West Coast to ensure that this development doesn’t happen in the same way that resource extraction has happened in this area in the past. As Vice-Chair of the Yurok Tribe, Frankie Meyers, said at the recent Yurok Tribe Wind Energy Summit, “One hundred years from now, our grandchildren will look back. Let’s make sure they look back and are proud of what we did.”