Floating Wind Farms Are About to Transform the Oceans

Alla weinstein did not invent the floating wind turbine. This is something she wanted to make clear early in our Zoom call, as if she were worried I’d give her too much credit. “I don’t need to invent. There are plenty of inventions,” she said. “But a lot of inventions die on the grapevine if they aren’t carried through.” What Weinstein does is carry them through.

For that, she does want credit. When I asked if she’d put the idea of floating offshore wind generation in the minds of California’s energy commissioners, she bristled cheerfully. “I would put it more strongly than that,” she said, shaking her auburn curls. “I didn’t give anyone ideas. I basically told them, ‘This is what needs to be done.’” The state needed clean energy, she reasoned, and she knew a couple of inventors with the technology to produce it: a floating platform designed to support a wind turbine on the surface of just about any large water body in the world.

If you haven’t been following the tortured saga of offshore wind power—or even if you have—you may not recognize how completely floating offshore wind technology stands to alter the global energy landscape. Just 10 years ago, installing offshore wind in the Eastern Pacific Ocean was technologically impossible: Conventional wind turbines typically sit atop giant steel cylinders called “monopiles,” which have to be driven into the ocean floor and rarely sink deeper than 100 feet. Other structures, known as “four-legged jackets,” can go as deep as 200 feet. But the continental shelf off California breaks fast and steep, dropping to depths of more than 600 feet not far from shore. Floating platforms, meanwhile, can sit on the surface of oceans thousands of feet deep, and can be assembled onshore and towed to their various destinations—as far out as transmission cables buried in the seafloor can extend back to land.

And while floating wind technology currently costs more than the conventional monopiles, that won’t be true for much longer. Once developed, a single platform design can be installed along hundreds of miles of coast with very little modification, making mass production possible and cost reduction likely. “You can literally have one design of a support structure that will be the same for California, Oregon, and Washington,” Weinstein said, “and maybe even Alaska.” A floating offshore wind farm doesn’t require pile driving or heavy construction in rough waters. “The only thing you have to do offshore is hook [the platform] up to the mooring that you laid out ahead of time,” said Weinstein.

In the U.S., floating wind technology is poised to revive an industry that just a few years ago seemed moribund, straitjacketed by location constraints, equipment shortages, and wealthy coastal-property owners who wanted their sea views undisturbed. For California in particular, floating offshore wind could be the key to achieving 60 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and 100 percent by 2045, as the state legislature has required. Wind puts electricity on the grid just when solar-saturated California needs it most: in the evening and nighttime, when people come home from work and power up their air-conditioning. The technology could allow the state to retire its last natural-gas power plants, wean its grid off nuclear power, and still have enough clean electricity to power its expanding fleet of electric vehicles.