California’s port infrastructure will pose a key — but not insurmountable — obstacle to the development of floating offshore wind (FOSW) projects along the state’s coastline, industry experts said Thursday.

The subject arose during a scoping workshop the California Energy Commission convened to seek public input on its “draft research concept” regarding the development and testing of FOSW technology.

While West Coast offshore wind development lags that of the East Coast, 14 developers responded to the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2018 call for information and nominations to develop wind facilities off the coast of California. Development is more of challenge along the West Coast compared with the East because of the very narrow continental shelf and steep drop-off close to shore, necessitating the construction of floating — rather than fixed-bottom — turbines. (See Differences Aside, West Coast OSW Can Learn from East.)

During Thursday’s virtual workshop, the CEC laid out a tentative objective that state-funded research projects support “the development and pilot demonstration of innovative floating offshore wind component(s) and installation processes that advance the readiness, reliability and cost-competitiveness of floating offshore wind in California.” It also seeks to increase understanding of how FOSW will affect sensitive wildlife species and habitats in the region.

The final research concept will guide the CEC’s investment plan for dispensing grants through California’s ratepayer-funded Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program, which currently invests about $130 million annually across all energy research and pilot programs.

During the workshop, Alla Weinstein, CEO of Castle Wind, said she thinks a key issue was omitted from the CEC’s stated objective. She noted that a still unreleased report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, discussed publicly during a recent California Public Utilities Commission meeting, found that the “distance to port” for projects in federal lease areas will be the “main driver” of the cost of energy for California FOSW.

BOEM’s call for nominations designated three sites for development, including the Humboldt Call Area off California’s remote North Coast and the Morro Bay and Diablo Canyon call areas off the sparsely populated Central Coast.

“The distance to port is one element, but also the port infrastructure and limitations that are visible right now are going to be the biggest challenges the industry is going to face,” Weinstein said.

The CEC failed to include the issue as one of its main focus areas despite the fact that “it is the single most important [factor] for the levelized cost of energy [LCOE], and it should be included as one of the top priorities,” Weinstein said. The CEC’s Silvia Palma-Rojas earlier told workshop participants that the commission is targeting an LCOE of $75/MWh or lower for California FOSW.

Sam Kanner, offshore wind lead for the independent Otherlab, noted that many California ports “are inaccessible to floating wind designs because of transit draft and air draft considerations from bridges or whatnot.”

“In California, there are only a few ports that could handle floating offshore wind, maybe six or so, and the largest ones are quite far away from the current lease areas,” said Markus Wernli, assistant vice president at civil engineering firm WSP USA. “That compares to the East Coast, where you could draw a circle of 50 miles and get 27 ports out of it.”

Wernli advised the CEC to focus on those ports that can most feasibly handle FOSW development. He said the commission should “help people in those communities around those ports understand what it means to have a facility that does work in offshore wind.” He recommended the state develop environmental and economic studies for those areas and assess supply-chain logistics.

Jason Cotrell, CEO of RCAM Technologies, which specializes in 3D concrete printing of renewable energy structure components, emphasized the importance of the state’s role in studying its ports. He recounted how the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) performed a 2018 study of that state’s port infrastructure for suitability for OSW development.

That study “identified 11 relatively small ports, many of them behind bridges, many of them underutilized, as potential candidates,” Cotrell said. “Too small for a staging of an offshore wind plant, but certainly potentially valuable.”

Cotrell’s company determined it could have used a small Brooklyn port identified in the report to annually produce “something like $50 million” in offshore wind components using its 3D printing technology. He said wind developer Equinor later chose the site as an operations-and-maintenance base for its offshore facilities.

Studies such as the one performed by NYSERDA are “very important to small companies like ours that have limited means and resources to perform these studies ourselves,” Cotrell said, adding that new technologies could unearth the manufacturing and O&M of ports that have been previously “written off.”

“So, there may be a lot of potential that perhaps some of us have not seen yet in California ports,” Cotrell said.

Pilot Concerns

Some workshop participants took issue with another aspect of the CEC’s objectives, advising the commission against seeking to develop a full-scale FOSW pilot, saying the cost would far exceed EPIC grant budgets.

“If the funding is intended to put hardware in the water and do a physical demonstration, you’re looking at a very large sum of money, and that is in the tens of millions of dollars,” Weinstein said. “I think there needs to be a realization that installing a full-size prototype in the water probably will not happen just because of the amount of money that will be required is beyond the funding that you have and the cost-share that would be required would be effectively prohibitive.”

Weinstein said that, unless a pilot is installed in state waters — which would not be representative of the actual builds in federal lease areas — it will require a lease from BOEM “that takes years and a lot of money and will not really lead to a demonstration project.”

“I think it’s really important for the commission to understand that developers are poised and ready to build utility-scale off the coast of California,” said Ross Tyler, senior developer at RWE Renewables. “Yes, there are still lots of unknowns from a technical perspective, but some of the technical challenges are being addressed as we speak, and I think [EPIC] is a noble effort to be part of that.”

But Tyler agreed with Weinstein that a full-scale pilot would be cost-prohibitive and said the industry is not really seeing demonstration projects, which would have to be permitted by BOEM and completed within the next three years.

“I think you really need to take a look and perhaps eliminate this notion of having pilot-scale in the water. Otherwise, the developers will not really be interested in participating. That’s my take,” Tyler said.

Cotrell agreed with Weinstein and Tyler about the infeasibility of a full-scale FOSW pilot but did see potential benefits from pilot projects for individual FOSW components.

“For example, in our case, we have some concepts and a little bit of funding to explore the 3D concrete printing of suction bucket anchors, which are the third-most capital-intensive component of a floating wind turbine,” behind the turbine itself and its foundation, Cotrell said.

He said his company could manufacture those anchors and even tow them out to sea and embed them at pilot-scale but could not attach them to a full-scale FOSW turbine at EPIC funding levels.

“I just wanted to offer the different perspective of a component developer that pilot-scale tests and projects are certainly possible, but a lot of care has to be taken with the definition,” Cotrell said.