As one of the world’s single largest economies and a member in good standing among the 50 states of the United States of America, California feels entitled to have a say in its own future, including the use of its offshore wind resources. The Trump administration thinks otherwise, setting the stage for a high stakes legal mano-a-mano that has suddenly burst onto the media radar. While Trump appears to be losing his grip on power, California is ready and eager to take the gloves off, so hold on to your hats… The Great Offshore Wind Lease Buyouts (Some Say Bribes, But Whatever) Lawsuits are part for the course where President Trump is concerned, a carryover from his private sector business activities into his more recent career as a servant of the public. In particular, offshore wind stakeholders have been battling the President in court ever since he swept into office for the second time last year, issued a blanket ban on new offshore leases, held up other projects in the pipeline for undefined “review,” and outright halted work on a group of five projects that were already deep into the construction phase. Trump ultimately succeeded in preserving his authority to stop issuing new leases in federal waters. However, he failed in every other respect. Last December, a federal judge ruled that projects with permits and leases already in hand cannot be suspended indefinitely for no good reason (for the record, that was the same judge who ruled in favor of the president’s authority to stop issuing new leases). Earlier this year, a series of other federal judges also ruled that work on the five halted projects can proceed. As a result, the President is left holding the bag, or the credit as the case may be, for presiding over a long-awaited burst of activity in the US offshore wind industry. The five under-construction projects alone account for about 8 gigawatts in new generating capacity along the energy-thirsty US Atlantic Coast, with other lease areas in the pipeline contributing many more . To ice the offshore wind cake, the Trump order suspending new offshore lease sales is only good for another 2.5 years, upon which another person will take over the Oval Office along with the lease-issuing authority. Presumably that person will be someone less consumed by a personal vendetta against wind turbines and more interested in creating new jobs, reducing electricity costs, and building more resiliency into the national grid. And so, faced with yet another failed legacy, Trump is in the process of hiding the evidence. Similar to other embarrassment-shielding actions such as covering the nameplate of Lincoln Center (minus his illegally added name) with tarps, or hiding his botched Reflecting Pool renovation behind a chain link fence, Trump has decided to use taxpayer dollars to buy leases back from offshore leaseholders. California Is Having None Of It That, too, is a temporary measure at best, but at least Trump gets to wipe those leases off his ledger by the time he leaves office. TotalEnergies was the first to take the taxpayer money and run earlier this year, dropping two lease areas off the coast of New York and the Carolinas. New York and six other states promptly sued the Trump administration while also demanding an explanation from TotalEnergies, and now California gets to take a turn. On June 23, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the chair of the California Energy Commission, David Hochschild, issued a formal Notice of Intent to Sue, alleging an illegal agreement between the US Department of the Interior and Golden State Wind, a 50-50 joint venture between the Spanish firm Offshore Wind and the UK firm Reventus Power. The California Notice of Intent alleges that the Trump administration illegally allocated $120 million to pay GSW to step away from its plans to build a 2-gigawatt wind farm in a Morrow Bay federal wind energy area located off the midsection of California. The sum fully repays GSW for the $120 million it spent to acquire the lease just a few years ago, in 2022. The Notice also follows a parallel action in May, in which CEC served an administrative investigative subpoena aimed at exposing GSW’s role in the process. Separately, CEC is also demanding answers from the Chicago-based firm Invenergy, which received a $765 million payout from the Trump administration to walk away from another lease area in Morrow Bay along with two other leases in New York and Maine. “Nationwide, this brings the total amount of taxpayer funds spent by the Trump Administration on offshore wind buyouts to nearly $2.6 billion—all to get power companies not to produce clean energy,” California charges. Floating Offshore Wind Turbines Will Happen, Trump Or No Trump Although an increasing number of other states have been impacted by Trump’s feckless pursuit of a clean slate, the California leases are particularly noteworthy because they are located in waters too deep to accommodate conventional wind farm construction. A typical offshore wind farm consists of turbines sitting on top of tall monopiles sunk into the seabed. Instead, GSW plans — or was planning — to use floating turbines, which rest on platforms anchored to the seabed by slim cables. Floating wind is a relatively new technology, and it has the potential to unlock new wind areas that are too deep for monopile construction, such as those located in Morrow Bay. Somewhat ironically, in the early 2000’s US taxpayers devoted millions of dollars to help private sector floating wind innovators carry out R&D work leading to commercial applications (here’s one example). With Trump in office, the US has already lost the opportunity to take full advantage of its foundational role in the global floating wind industry. Not to worry, though. Trump has sidelined the US but plenty of other nations around the world are eager and willing to pick up the torch. For that matter, R&D work on offshore wind continues to percolate through the US research ecosystem. Last year, for example, Texas A&M University reported progress on a new floating wind turbine anchoring system aimed at improving the reliability of offshore wind farms while lowering costs. The concept for the new system was first introduced in 2017, which would put it right around the beginning of Trump’s first term in office. Nine years later, the work has carried on through the Biden administration and into the second coming of Trump. “The innovative Deeply Embedded Ring Anchor (DERA) system provides a more efficient solution than traditional anchors created for the oil and gas industry, which are not ideal for extensive renewable energy initiatives,” TAMU explained in a press statement last November. While Texas is not particularly well known as a hotspot for offshore wind development, the school notes that the project includes collaborations with research institutions in three states that have outlined ambitious offshore wind plans: the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Maine and the University of California If federal policy makers insist on interfering with state-based energy policy past Trump’s last day in office, it’s a big world out there. TAMU notes that the new system is adaptable to different seabed conditions, including those found in wind-friendly nations including Taiwan and South Korea among others. Image: Floating wind turbines are the key to California’s ambitious offshore wind plans, and the state does not intend for the Trump administration to get in the way (cropped, courtesy of California Energy Commission).
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