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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. We're coming to you from a boat off the coast of Norway, where EPIC climate attorney Matt Simmons and I, Tom Wheeler, are checking out offshore wind turbines. Matt, what's your impression looking at this turbine? What stands out to you?

MATT SIMMONS:

The most is that it's leaning quite a bit, it leans with the wind and so it actually looks like it's standing at a bit of an angle, which I guess I knew was possible but I hadn't seen in my head until I'm staring at it.

WHEELER:

All right, so joining this show is Ciara Emery, who works with RWE, one of the offshore wind energy developers off of Humboldt's coast. And so this turbine, though, is significantly smaller than the ones that will likely go off of Humboldt's coast. So this is a 3.6 megawatt turbine.

CIARA EMERY:

Correct, yep. It's a turbine that's been in the water since 2021, and as you know, there's new turbine technology and capacity all the time. So again, we're going to need some time to make those technological decisions.

WHEELER:

What is the size that is probable or potential for Humboldt County?

EMERY:

I think that you might see somewhere between...

WHEELER:

18 to 25 megawatt turbine size.

EMERY:

Something like that, yeah.

WHEELER:

So, I have also visited the East Coast, where I saw a 14 megawatt turbine, so significantly larger than this, although to some extent we just kind of scale up the technology. At least the turbine, it's just kind of scaling it up, right? So the larger rotor-swept area is a thing that increases power on a turbine, so it's going to be taller, the blades are going to be longer, the total area that is capturing the wind is going to be bigger as a result. There are going to be a couple of different factors that play into what technology ultimately is employed off of Humboldt County's coast. Ciara, tell us a little bit some of the factors that RWE and your fellow developer, Vineyard, who has a separate lease for the Humboldt Wind Energy Area, what are the sort of factors that will influence the decision?

EMERY:

You have to consider where your assembly port is and what the constraints of your port is going to be. And then you have to consider your survey work results of what kind of anchors do you need, what does your seafloor or seabed look like. And all of that survey data and other items will determine the technologies that make the most sense for the port and for the lease area.

WHEELER:

All right, so I am also on this trip with Jen Kalt, Executive Director of Humboldt Waterkeeper. So we are off the coast of Norway. We're looking at an offshore wind turbine. Tell us about this kind of environment in which these turbines are seated, right? Because it's somewhat similar to Humboldt, maybe in kind of the intensity of the area or the windiness, certainly. Yeah.

JEN KALT:

It's definitely very windy. We're 10 kilometers off the coast in the North Sea. The sea is pretty mellow today though, but you can only imagine what it gets to be like in the wintertime. Probably pretty rough.

WHEELER:

What are your impressions upon seeing these?

KALT:

Well, you know, one thing I, I thought was, I thought it would look a lot bigger. This biggest one of the two that we just saw is about the height of the pulp mill smokestack. And I thought it would look bigger up close, but... Also, the blades turn very slowly. I think someone said 16 rotations per minute. Which seems pretty slow. It's not like a fan blade or anything like that.

WHEELER:

So Rob, you are part of the project development team here for RWE. This isn't your first rodeo though. You have worked in offshore wind for a while. You've developed projects on the East Coast. Tell us about your background and your history and what you're hoping to accomplish here with RWE.

ROB MASTRIA:

Sure. So I've been working in the renewable energy development space for the past 16 years. I started in onshore wind and solar in the continental United States. And about four years ago, I made the move to offshore wind where I started working with Orsted. I was the development director of the South Fork Project, which is now operating and delivering power to New York. And my goal here is to try to bring my experience from the East Coast and start kicking off the offshore wind floating projects in the West Coast.

WHEELER:

Rob is from Boston. One of the kind of interesting things that's happened is that Boston's become this hub for offshore wind energy development. You're based there, a number of folks from Vineyard are based there, the other company who is in the same wind energy area. Can you talk about kind of the economic development and what offshore wind has kind of brought to the East Coast and this like hub of offshore wind companies that have settled in New England And, you know, looking into your crystal ball, what does kind of offshore wind mean for Humboldt's economy?

MASTRIA:

Sure. Well, on the East Coast specifically, it's brought a new revitalization of some of our port facilities, where historically, especially in Massachusetts, was dominated by the fishing industry years ago in towns like New Bedford and Fall River. And now the benefit of offshore wind is we've, in renewables in general, is that we've been able to retire some of our fossil fuel based power plants, the Brayton Point plant in Somerset. And that's now been turned into the offshore wind hub that Vineyard and other projects are going to be using. So we've seen a lot of renewed construction and infrastructure in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, which has led to more jobs and economic development in the area.

And so I think that similar type of thing can happen in California. And what we're looking to do is to bring that new clean energy economy, specific to offshore wind of the West Coast, enable new infrastructure to be built, which is going to require that the transmission grid also be re-expanded. But that's also going to bring resiliency to areas like Northern California, that's sometimes subject to power outages and issues related to wildfires and things like that. And hopefully this will bolster the local grid and increase their reliability.

I think that the workforce development is going to be a big part of what we're doing, especially up in rural areas like the Humboldt area. I think this can be an opportunity to bring new, good-paying jobs. And we've been working closely with the labor unions and what kind of skills that they can bring to these projects, both on the onshore infrastructure side, like port development, as well as training the next group of people for jobs, both onshore and offshore, in the assembly of these floating foundations and turbines onshore, but also doing the service and maintenance that's going to be needed for the life of these projects offshore.

WHEELER:

So this is, I believe, your first time visiting this area, visiting this demonstrator. What was kind of your gut reaction upon seeing it? What were your first thoughts?

MASTRIA:

So, I have seen several wind farms before in Europe, going to the UK before, and in Denmark. The floating was quite a different thing to see, and I thought it was really impressive. The technical aspect of these projects always amazes me. I have an engineering background, so an appreciation of what it takes to design these projects and actually implement them. The floating offshore demonstrator was very impressive. The fact that it can generate power while also staying upright. There is some tilt that's there that looks quite a bit different from the fixed projects you see on the east coast, but I think they're proving that these projects are feasible. We can scale them up. All the technical solutions are there for us to capitalize on, and even those demonstrator projects are providing power to the grid by being connected to shore. So, there's also a benefit that we are able to test these concepts, but also deliver clean energy to the grid, even right now.

WHEELER:

Very good. Thank you so much.

MASTRIA:

Thank you.

WHEELER:

All right. Now we are back in Arcata, having gone to Norway, seen wind turbines. I'm joined by EPIC's climate attorney, Matt Simmons and Jen Kalt, executive director of Humboldt Waterkeeper. Hey, Jen.

KALT:

Hey, Tom and Matt.

WHEELER:

So we were on this trip together. It was organized by Oceantic, which is a nonprofit representing developer, wind developer interests in offshore wind. So we went to Stavanger, Norway and saw demonstrator wind turbines, floating wind turbines off the coast of Stavanger. Matt, what are you taking back from this trip? What are going to be the kind of lessons, the things that you tell your community at EPIC and in the broader Humboldt community?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, so, so so much of my work around investigating offshore wind is, is really abstract, it's, it's reading environmental studies, it's attending classes, it's attending workshops. And in all of that, it can get sort of lost that these are actual real machines out in the world. And so going to Norway and seeing the world's first floating offshore wind turbine, which was installed all the way back in 2009, and it's been generating electricity for the Norwegian electric grid ever since, seeing it operate, seeing it work, is really valuable because it makes this all a lot more concrete, and helps me really imagine the, that these projects are feasible and real, and not just something in a paper or, or proposed. So that's, that's sort of the value I got out of this trip, I think.

WHEELER:

Something for me thinking about the first turbine being installed in 2009 is how rapidly this industry has seemingly grown or both how rapidly it's grown and how so much of it is actually just still in kind of conceptual phases, right? So we have these demonstrator turbines, we have working offshore wind turbines in Scotland, in Portugal. This all just happened in 15 years, right? 2009 feels really very long ago, right? It's remarkable to me that we've made all this distance in 15 years. Here we are in 2024, we're not anticipating that any offshore wind turbines will be constructed or operable until 2035 at the earliest. So it's also this reflection that a lot can happen in the next 10 years. And we've seen pretty dramatic growth in the technology, in the turbine size that is being considered. We have a lot of time is another one of my reflections. And also that time is going to go by really quickly. So there's like this duality here. Jen, do you have any reflections on the offshore wind turbines that you're going to come back and tell your friends, tell your co-workers about?

KALT:

Well, you know, I was a little surprised at how small those two turbines seemed out on the ocean because technically the larger of the two, the newer one, is as tall as the pulp mill smokestack. It didn't look that way on the ocean, even though we were pretty close to it. It didn't seem that big to me. But the ones that are being proposed here are three times that size, so I'm not sure how relevant that really is.

SIMMONS:

Well, actually, Tom is lucky enough to have seen the ones on the East Coast, and so maybe, Tom, you could talk about comparing the experience of the ones in Norway to the ones on the East Coast.

WHEELER:

Yeah, the ones in Norway were puny. They weren't very large. That said, I saw 14 megawatt turbines on the East coast, which were ordered magnitude, three times taller than the one we saw in Norway. I think that there's something about when you see them out at sea, the size of the turbines is kind of lost on you where there's not a lot of things on the horizon or things nearby to kind of gauge height by, so no reference points.

So I also thought that in going to the East Coast and seeing the Vineyard one project, I thought I was going to just be blown away by these, you know, a thousand foot tall-ish wind turbines. And they seemed just kind of underwhelming. It's not the right word, but they didn't seem radical when I went to see them and I was expecting them to feel radical. And maybe it was just my expectations versus reality. And so when I go out there expecting things to be feeling one way and then they're not, it kind of heightens that effect. But yeah, it just never, it never struck me that these were very scary, very imposing.

I think that there's a way in which when we have numbers on a page, those almost appear scarier than the thing as it exists. Because so much of the height too is not really the turbine, it's the turbine blade. When we're talking about like, oh yeah, 1,200 feet tall for a 20 megawatt turbine. The nacelle, where the generator is, where the axis is, where the blades spin off of, that's not 1200 feet tall, right? That is maybe 600 feet tall. So the turbine structure itself is considerably smaller. And then you have these kind of delicate blades that kind of grab the wind.

KALT:

Right, of course, they'll look much bigger when they're being constructed in Humboldt Bay because we will have something to compare them to and they'll be temporary. They'll be built here and then hauled out. But I think a lot of people are not really thinking about the Humboldt Bay side of this project when they think about offshore wind, which is, of course, mostly what I'm thinking about from Humboldt Waterkeeper's perspective is the changes to the bay. That said, I'm not particularly concerned about the visual impacts other than light pollution. But we're getting ready to go tonight to this visual simulations meeting and so we'll get a better sense of what that might look like and what people's reactions to it will be after we record this show.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report and we are checking out offshore wind turbines. So speaking of Vineyard One, the project that I saw on the East Coast, we had news while we were in Norway that there was a catastrophic failure of one of the blades on a turbine at Vineyard One which sent fiberglass and other components of the blade into the ocean and then onto local beaches. This has really embarrassed, I think, GE and the wind energy companies.

So it was interesting to be there and to see this disaster is hyperbolic here, right? It was one blade that failed, but it was interesting to see the reaction of the wind energy companies while we were on this trip together. I would say that their reaction was one of fear that the public would overemphasize or not properly contextualize what had happened. That this was this embarrassing event, but it is a rare and embarrassing event. Matt, do you have any reflections on the incident that happened, the breaking apart of this wind turbine blade and how you feel about this having visited a wind farm?

SIMMONS:

Yeah, a couple of thoughts. So first of all, this happened during testing, before the blades are installed, they're sort of, I guess, spun up and tested to make sure that they will last a long time. And it was during that test, which obviously this blade failed, that it broke apart. I think the thing that I would emphasize is that lots and lots of wind turbine blades are currently operating without shattering. The ones we saw in Norway, one of them had been installed in 2009 and one of them had been installed in 2019. And to my knowledge, neither of them have ever had anything like this happen.

And so I would urge folks as they're learning about this to not think that this is something sort of inherent or systemic to wind turbine blades and to think of it more as a one-off event. It's not system-wide.

I think the other thing I'll say is that the reaction I remember most from someone who works at a wind energy company was a feeling of almost shame and sort of, they were feeling about how they had worked in Massachusetts and they actually lived in Massachusetts and they had told people not to worry about this sort of thing happening. And so now that it had happened, they felt like deeply embarrassed and regretful and wanting to make it right and wanting to make sure that all the work being done to like clean up the beaches was happening extremely quickly because they want to be a responsible actor. And so I was actually, I was surprised. I felt like there was like a more of a human reaction to this than I would have expected -- maybe a little bit meanly -- of people who work at big corporations.

You know, they were thinking about this as a kid who also had played on beaches in Massachusetts and wanted them to be clean and safe, just like everyone does. And so I really appreciated that. I thought it was a good sign.

WHEELER:

I think one of my favorite local takes that I've seen was from Rob Holmland from the Harbor District. And so I'm going to quote him from the Lost Coast Outpost. "This is a good opportunity for us to observe how offshore wind energy companies manage unexpected events." And I think that that's a really important point here. And this is like an important test for us as a community to see how Vineyard and how GE Vernova deal with this event on the East Coast. Because things do happen, although blade failures are a rare event. When you look at all the wind turbines that have been installed all over the world and the failure rate of those wind turbine blades, it is an extremely uncommon thing to have occur.

It's still important because maybe it's not a wind turbine blade for us. Maybe it is a breakage of a mooring line, or maybe it is some other sort of structural failure of a wind turbine. These things may happen, right? And so seeing kind of the responsible response to an event I think is an important data point for us in evaluating whether or not this is the right technology for Humboldt County.

SIMMONS:

And then I guess just one more thing I'll add on that is that comparing the environmental impacts of these sorts of problems to the environmental impacts of other forms of energy generation, right? Like I'd much rather have a wind turbine blade break than an oil spill, right? Or a nuclear energy reactor having some sort of meltdown, right? Like these are not good and we need to do everything we can to avoid them and to clean them up if they ever happen, but they are less impactful than I think some of our alternative energy sources that we're hopefully moving away from.

WHEELER:

So Jen, we also saw some associated port facilities near Stavanger that are not terribly related to offshore wind at present, but I think they are hoping that they could be in the future. This was part of the field trip. We saw a parts manufacturer for wind turbines and visited a port facility. Anything from that portion of our field trip that stands out to you as someone who is particularly concerned about the impact of green port development in Humboldt Bay and the impact of turbine construction in Humboldt Bay?

KALT:

Well, as you said, that was a pretty small port in comparison to what's being proposed here. I think if it was that small, it would be a lot less impactful, obviously. I did find it interesting that the woman who gave us the tour talked about how they're expanding the port and that they hope to be constructing and assembling wind turbines there because the fact that there's a demonstration, two demonstration turbines, and the fact that people are talking about hoping that they get a bigger project there was interesting. I mean, I really was excited about Redwood Coast Energy Authority's demonstration-sized project that would be eight to 10 or 12 wind turbines that we could see on a smaller scale what it's going to be like before launching into this bigger project. But it was interesting that people there seem somewhat enthusiastic about expanding the offshore wind turbines that they have there already.

WHEELER:

Something else that stood out to me about Norway was the degree to which I think that the populace is more comfortable with wind technology. Generally from our flights to and from Europe, we flew over fixed bottom offshore wind farms off the coast of the Netherlands. We saw very many wind turbines just on hill slopes in Norway as well. Norway seems to really be leaning into decarbonization. All of the taxis we saw were all electric. It seemed like there was really a push for things to be done in a low carbon way. We were on electric boats at one point on our tour as well. So there might be a degree to which Norway is just more comfortable with technology like this because they're more exposed to it.

KALT:

Well, they also have a lot of offshore oil drilling off their coast. And Matt and I went to the Stavanger Petroleum Museum, which featured the history of offshore oil drilling there and many, many really big accidents that have happened in which I think one of them, over 150 people were killed because they're out there living on the oil platforms. And so I think there it's more real to them that we need to get off of fossil fuels. Whereas here, it's a bit of an abstraction for us. We say we wanna get off fossil fuels, but we don't have offshore oil drilling right here on our coast that we can say, let's trade that for something that's less damaging to the environment and to the people who are doing the work. So there's that.

WHEELER:

Well, on, on that, I think that there was this event that happened a couple of years ago that I think has been kind of almost criminally underreported, which was when the fuel barges coming into Humboldt Bay broke loose from its tug and struck a rock and it was thankfully a dual hold vessel. So we didn't have an escapement of oil and gas from this, well, gasoline from this barge, but it was close. And we are uniquely susceptible to, to that sort of an issue as a community who has our gasoline products barged in from the Bay area, we are always one shipwreck away from having a gross fouling of Humboldt Bay from, from gasoline. And I think that that's important to take into consideration here as we are doing these sorts of things that will present new and novel risks to the environment is that we're doing them, or we're thinking about them because there are already preexisting risks to the environment that could be bad and could be catastrophic in a single event, like an oil spill or are bad and catastrophic their impact on the environment, like, like global climate change.

KALT:

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't realize that the vast majority, I'm not going to throw out a number, but the vast majority of our gasoline and diesel comes in on barges through the Humboldt Bay entrance, which is pretty, pretty sketchy. They dock at the Chevron dock. They're just south of the Bayshore Mall. Pump the fuel into those giant tanks that are about six feet above sea level today. I think those tanks were built in the thirties or forties or something. I often think when people are talking about sea level rise, what are we going to do about those fuel storage tanks by the Bayshore Mall, but there's also the risk of earthquakes too. The nuclear power plant at King Salmon was shut down because of the seismic danger and PG&E didn't want to spend the money to upgrade as, as would be required for seismic safety, but now we have a fossil fuel plant.

WHEELER:

So we were the second delegation that Oceantic has brought to see these floating offshore wind turbines in Stavanger, Norway. There was another delegation that went this past fall, and primarily these have been representatives of tribal nations. We had a number of representatives on our trip. So hopefully I'm stating my intention here. Hopefully we can have a show in the future to get a tribal perspective from folks who have gone to see these wind turbines. So stay tuned for more from us on this subject.

KALT:

I just want to say too that was really one of the highlights of the trip for me was getting to know tribal representatives who mostly I had never met before and that was that was really great to hear their perspectives and get to know them as people rather than just sitting in the audience at a meeting or something like that.

WHEELER:

I agree. I gained a lot of perspective on some of some of the delegates were from tribes that had issued proclamations in opposition to offshore wind. So I got a lot of perspective on the motivations for them to issue those proclamations and what they're trying to achieve with their advocacy for offshore wind and to hear their questions and to to kind of see the project through their eyes as we were experiencing this together was was a was an important experience for me.

KALT:

Yeah, and I just, I hope people keep an open mind because we're fairly early. We're really early in this process. I mean, this isn't going to happen for a number of years and there's the studies that are going to go on for quite a few years have just begun. So there's going to be a lot more information to consider.

WHEELER:

So be sure to check out northcoastoffshorewind.org. There you can find a lot of the most frequently asked questions about offshore wind, together with answers that cite to primary sources so you can trust the reliability of the information that you're receiving. So check it out: northcoastoffshorewind.org. It is a project of Humboldt Waterkeeper, EPIC, and the Core Hub at the Humboldt Area Foundation.

All right, well, this has been another episode of the Econews Report. Join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.