Will Morro Bay wind farms be the demise of Port San Luis?

June 25, 2023

OPINION by ROBERT SIDENBERG

I heard about the proposed Morro Bay Offshore Wind Farm awhile back but didn’t really think too much about it. It would supposedly be out of sight and didn’t seem to have any affect on my life since I launch my fishing boat out of Port San Luis.

But now I understand there is a plan to industrialize Port San Luis to be used as a base to assemble, operate, and maintain the 1,000 feet wind turbines for the wind farm and for the Vandenberg Space Force base to barge in rockets and components that are too large to travel by land. This plan would involve major dredging to accommodate large ships, cranes and other heavy equipment. Additional concrete piers will be constructed requiring under water blasting.

I am not sure this is such a good idea. I began to do some research on wind farms. This developed into hours and hours of digging through material. What I have learned is quite alarming.

About wind energy

When looking at the actual science, producing electricity via wind turbines appears to be inefficient and expensive when compared to other options. It is a bit difficult to understand the real cost of electricity produced by wind turbines since wind is not constant. It doesn’t blow all the time nor does it always blow at the same speed. Traditional methods of producing electricity that use fuel such as natural gas or nuclear are more constant and easier to calculate.

One wind turbine operating at 100% efficiency, the maximum power that could be generated is approximately 56 watts per square foot of turbine swept area. For an offshore wind turbine farm to deliver 2,300 million watts equal to the same amount of energy supplied by the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, would require wind turbines covering a 1,072 square mile area along our coastline. Diablo Canyon covers only .02 square miles and produces 8.6% of California’s total electrical generation.

But wind turbines do not operate at 100% efficiency. They operate at 35% to 45% efficiency due to the intermittency and variation of the wind. The effect of the enhanced fluctuations is dramatic.

In a 2023 research paper published in the United Kingdom titled “The Inadequacy Of Wind Power,” the author, Professor of Physics, Wade Allison writes, “The generation of electricity by wind tells a disappointing story. The political enthusiasm and the investor hype are not supported by the evidence.”

When analyzing data of the total European Union and United Kingdom wind energy generated each day in 2021, with the installed nominal generating capacity of 236 GW, the highest output actually reached was only one day at 103 GW. Recorded data of wind power generated by all United Kingdom offshore wind farms for March 2022, shows during some periods it rose to the nominal installed capacity of 10 GW.

However, for eight days of the month it, averaged no more than 1.2 GW. So 8.8 GW was not produced during that time. That much lost energy equals 1,600 GWh which is 1,000 times the capacity of the worlds largest grid storage battery of 1.6 GWh located at Moss Landing, California.

The idea that enough large battery storage plants can be built to store enough energy to cover the periods when enough wind isn’t blowing is not a realistic solution. We still will need traditional power plants to be running to cover the fluctuations of the wind farms.

Generating electricity with offshore wind turbine farms does not appear to be a viable technology on its own. None of the operations in service now around the world are even close to being profitable and it appears they never will without being propped up with government subsidies and tax credits as they are today.

How easily, without pause our government gives away the peoples money, our money. Are we not being taxed enough as it is? Of course if consumers are willing to pay exceedingly high electricity rates four to five times the current rates then wind farms might be profitable at times when the wind blows. Actually if we continue down this road we will be forced to pay these rates.

In looking at other countries that have embarked on aggressive renewable “green energy” programs like wind and solar, what is happening in Germany should be a lesson to us all.

After shutting down their last remaining nuclear power plant, Germany’s economy has fallen into recession and they are facing electricity shortages and soaring prices while critical industries are leaving the country. Some suggest Germany will have to go back to nuclear if it wants to phase out all fossil fuel as wind and solar will not fully cover demand.

And in the United States, Avangrid, the developer of Massachusetts’s largest approved offshore wind project, Commonwealth Wind, is wanting to renegotiate contracts they signed with the three major utilities. The company says that due to supply constraints and rising interest rates they will need to charge more than originally agreed for their wind power for the project to be viable. That cost will of course be passed on to the consumers.

A good sound energy program should be sensible, reliable, and affordable. Offshore wind farms do not meet any of this criteria. We are already paying a lot for electricity and with the state’s plan to require all cars and homes to be electric we will certainly be paying even more.

To cover our coastline with thousands of offshore wind turbines and industrializing many of our ports, including Port San Luis, to support the wind farms is a bad idea. We are setting ourselves up for a real disaster.

We are being forced into an energy program by the state of California that very likely will leave us in a vulnerable position with electricity shortages and high consumer rates. No person or local governing body has been given a choice in the matter. The promise of good paying jobs and a boost to the local economy is being presented as a big benefit. But who really believes that?

An environmental nightmare

What about the negative impact to tourism and the loss of jobs related to it, or to the local commercial and sport fishing industries and the business that support them? And what about the disastrous impact of large scale dredging and underwater blasting to the marine life and birds?

The “zone of lethality” is a term used in environmental assessment reports required for projects such as this that denotes the number of fish, whales, or birds are expected to be killed either by the dredging and blasting during the construction or the by the wind turbines while in service.

The preparation for offshore wind farms along our Mid-Atlantic coastline is being blamed for the killing of 30 whales and a dozen dolphins. A recent report compiled by two federal agencies, NOAA and BOEM finds that noise, vibration, electromagnetic fields, heat transfer, and thermal radiation associated with offshore wind farms could alter the marine environment. Noise levels from the turbines may have negative effects on communication, foraging, and predator detection.

A study by the California Ocean Protection Council with funding from the California Energy Commission evaluated the effects of offshore wind turbines in the Morro Bay, Diablo Canyon, and Humboldt Areas.

The sustained northwesterly winds in these areas drive the upwelling of deeper, cool, nutrient-rich waters that sustain a thriving ecosystem. Modest changes (about 5% reduction) to wind speeds found near the wind farms leads to a decrease in upwelled physical volume transport to the coastal zone.

The development of large-scale off shore energy has the potential to reduce the wind stress at the sea surface, which could have local and regional implications on the overall ecosystem.

The global agenda to reduce CO2 emissions has quickly become a frenzy to reach zero emissions without any rational thought or common sense. When it comes to something as important to our survival as the production of electrical energy we need go about this
in a more intelligent fashion.

Our economy, our food and water supply, our financial system, our military, our freedom, all depends on a consistent, reliable, and affordable method of generating electricity. Of all the ways that we can produce renewable electrical energy, wind energy is probably the worst.

Other options

But we do have other proven, reliable, and affordable options that take up less space on the planet, do less harm, and make a lot more sense.

Today, there are companies that capture CO2 from manufacturing plants and sell it for commercial and industrial use. Scientists have developed a technique that removes CO2 from the exhaust flues of natural gas power plants.

Natural gas is a relatively clean burning fuel. It wasn’t that long ago when the government was pushing for automobiles to run on natural gas. Renewable natural gas is a biogas that can be used in place of fossil natural gas. It comes from a variety of sources like existing solid waste landfills, wastewater treatment plants, livestock farms, etc. And there is also green hydrogen, another carbon free fuel source that is created from water.

This project being planned for Port San Luis to serve the Morro Bay wind farm is a bad idea on many levels. And the same applies to the wind farm project in Morro Bay.

As far as the additional use by Vandenberg, although I am in full support of the Space Force program, I do not think Port San Luis is the place for that. They have other options that would be better suited.

For those of us who love the Central Coast it is time to stand up and make our voices heard. Our representatives in Sacramento are out of control and need to start representing us. These two projects are just the beginning of a much bigger plan to install thousands of wind turbines along our coastline.

It is time to get organized. We need to save Morro Bay and Port San Luis and the Central Coast.

Robert Sidenberg is an Arroyo Grande resident. For more than 40 years, he has enjoyed sports fishing out of Port San Luis.