43 firms in line to bid on US offshore wind farms

Turbines nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower would float 25 miles off California

PORTLAND, Ore. — Tuesday marks the first-ever U.S. auction of leases to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms, in the deep waters off the West Coast.

The live, online auction for the five leases — three off California’s central coast and two off its northern coast — has attracted strong interest and 43 companies from around the world are approved to bid. The wind turbines will float roughly 25 miles offshore.

The growth of offshore wind comes as climate change intensifies and the need for clean energy grows. It also is getting cheaper. The cost of developing offshore wind has dropped 60% since 2010 according to a July report by the International Renewable Energy Agency. It declined 13% in 2021 alone.

Offshore wind is well established in the U.K. and some other countries but is just beginning to ramp up off America’s coasts, and this is the nation’s first foray into floating wind turbines. Auctions have been for those anchored to the seafloor.

Europe has some floating offshore wind — a project in the North Sea has been operating since 2017 — but the potential for the technology is huge in areas of strong wind off America’s coasts, said Josh Kaplowitz, vice president of offshore wind at the American Clean Power Association.

“We know that this works. We know that this can provide a huge slice of our electricity needs,” he said. “We can reach our greenhouse gas goals only with offshore wind as part of the puzzle.”

Similar auctions are in the works off Oregon’s coast next year and in the Gulf of Maine in 2024.

President Joe Biden set a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 using traditional technology that secures wind turbines to the ocean floor, enough to power 10 million homes.

Minimum bids for the leases range from $6 million to $8 million, but sales could go higher. An auction earlier this year for traditional offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York and New Jersey netted more than $4 billion, a record for the U.S.

The nation’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Rhode Island in late 2016, allowing residents of small Block Island to shut off five diesel generators.

The sale is designed to promote a domestic supply chain and create union jobs. Bidders can convert part of their bids into credits that benefit those affected by the wind development — local communities, tribes and commercial fishermen.

As envisioned, the turbines — possibly about 1,000 feet tall, or nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower — will float on giant triangular platforms roughly the size of a small city block with cables anchoring them underwater. They’ll each have three blades longer than 350 feet.

Modern tall turbines, whether on or offshore, can produce more than 20 times more electricity than shorter machines, say, from the early 1990s.

The lease areas have the potential to generate 4.5 gigawatts of energy — enough for 1.5 million homes.