California offshore wind moves ahead

California has made substantial progress toward creating the infrastructure to support floating offshore wind farms that will generate 10 gigawatts of renewable power to support AI and other next generation technologies, according to Adam Stern, Executive Director, Offshore Wind California.

Stern was addressing the Pacific Offshore Wind Summit 2025 at Sacramento, California where he cited the following progress in support of floating offshore wind power:

• The California Independent System Operator (CISO): “approved its latest transmission plan with $4.6 billion in upgrades to prepare for offshore wind off California's North Coast.”
• The California Energy Commission: “adopted its AB 525 strategic plan, a detailed roadmap for deploying offshore wind in California's five lease areas, which together can generate seven to 10 gigawatts of clean power,” enough to power 7.5-10 million homes.
• The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) “set an interim target of up to 7.6 gigawatts for the State to procure offshore wind by the mid-2030s.”
• In November 2024, “California voters approved Prop Four, the $10 billion climate bond, that includes a $475 million down payment to upgrade California ports for floating offshore wind.”
• On May 19th, the Trump Administration rescinded a highly unusual stop-work order on the Empire Wind offshore wind project after intense opposition from officials in New York. This was supported by Norwegian energy giant Equinor, which is building Empire Wind. Stern noted: “We’ll continue to closely follow the news from Washington, including yesterday's Empire Wind decision and the lawsuit by 18 states regarding the January 20th presidential memorandum, and encourage federal officials to see the value of offshore wind as part of an all-of-the-above US energy strategy.”

Solar Energy Redux

David Hochschild, Chair, California Energy Commission (CEC) noted that the attacks against offshore wind recall political attacks against the solar energy industry that accelerated when the U.S. solar builder Solyndra went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a federal loan guarantee from the Obama Administration. In response, the solar sector organized to fight back: “We put together something called the ‘Solar War Room’. We had seven CEOs, solar CEOs, go out and meet with media and thought leaders, and just tell the story of the promise and the innovation that was happening and the growth. And what happened is significant … We went from being the highest cost resource on the electric market to the lowest cost.”

The result is: “Today, if you look at what is happening in the United States…last year, 81% of the capacity additions in the U.S. were from solar. It took in 2004 a year to construct one gigawatt of solar. In 2010, it took a month. In 2016, it took a week. In 2023, it took a day to build a gigawatt of solar. In 2024, half a day. It is now in excess of half a trillion dollars a year being invested in solar. It is the single biggest investment on the global electric grid.”

Hochschild explained that new power installations in the United States are increasingly electric power sourced by “clean energy.” Meanwhile, the sourcing of power from coal and fossil fuels is on the decline. The reason is: “because of the economies of scale 96% of the capacity additions nationwide last year on the grid were clean energy. And 96% of the retirements were fossil. So, the grid is actually getting cleaner in every state every year.”

Cold on Coal

Meanwhile, what has Meanwhile what happened with coal, “which was long talked about as the dominant source (that) was going to power the U.S. for a thousand years. That was 52%of our portfolio nationwide in 2011. It is now 16% and falling, I do not believe we are even going to have operating coal plants in the U.S. within a decade.”

Another “quiet success story” for renewable energy in California has been battery storage:” So, we have now the world's largest battery storage project. We are going to be voting on permitting on June 11th (an) even bigger, 4.6 gigawatt hours (project). And this is absolutely saving our bacon. Last summer, we had the highest temperatures in the history of California, the highest electric demand in the history of the State. And we got through it not only with without any outages, but also without even any flex alerts. Storage is really a huge part of the reason and why we have added now almost 16 gigawatts of storage in the last six years.”

He said the next stage of development is to support upgrades at California ports to support offshore wind farms: “The climate bond approved in November by the voters includes nearly half a billion dollars for port upgrades.”

Port of Long Beach Offshore Wind

Suzanne Plezia, Chief Harbor Engineer, Port of Long Beach then explained the Port’s plan to build a new offshore wind facility ‘Pier Wind’ in cooperation with other ports in California: “So, facilitating efficiencies and economies of scale is a key aspect of our strategy. It is going to require a multi-port strategy to develop floating offshore wind with manufacturing and fabrication facilities for those large components and sub-assemblies. These are delivered to staging and assembly sites to assemble those foundations and turbines before being towed out to the wind farm. That will be serviced by operations and maintenance facilities and on the critical enabling, staging and assembly sites. Starting with the foundation, assembly, which requires a heavy lift … to receive those subassemblies and a large area on the land to assemble multiple foundations at the same time. So, one foundation is complete about every one to two weeks, which was required to meet the production rates of these large-scale commercial wind farms.”

Tony Appleton, Offshore Wind California Board Chair and Offshore Wind Director for the firm Burns & McDonnell said that offshore wind is essential to not only meet the transition to electric vehicles but also for data centers and AI: “It will make a key contribution to the world's urgent, very urgent need for clean, reliable energy. In addition, it will meet the growing demand for electricity, not only from the ongoing energy needed for the transition to electric vehicles but also the rapidly growing demand for data centers and the AI revolution, which is accelerating very quickly.