California Affirms 25 GW Goal For Offshore Wind, Trump Or Not

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The US state of California is the fourth-largest economy in the world, and it holds 200 gigawatts of offshore wind potential in its hands. While US President Donald Trump would like to see all those clean gigawatts sit there, unused, California officials and industry stakeholders have other plans. They have just blown a big, fat offshore wind raspberry in the direction of the White House. After all, the wind will keep on blowing long after Trump leaves office as scheduled on January 20, 2029 — peacefully one hopes, this time.

200 Gigawatts Of Offshore Wind Potential

The estimate of 200 gigawatts comes from a study issued by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (since renamed the “National Laboratory of the Rockies”), which describes wind resources that are technically recoverable. Not all of that amount is realistically recoverable, but in 2022 the California Energy Commission used the figure to calculate a recoverable goal of 5 gigawatts by 2030 and 25 gigawatts by 2045.

Acting under the direction of California state law AB 525, CEC also laid plans for floating wind turbine technology to be deployed in order to achieve those goals, as much of the Pacific coast is too deep for traditional, monopile offshore turbine construction.

Floating wind is a relatively new development in the offshore wind field, but by 2022 the technology was already on a maturing pathway, partly due to R&D efforts by US innovators with substantial support from the US Department of Energy.

In a celebratory press release dated August 10, 2022, the trade organization Offshore Wind California emphasized that CEC’s 25-gigawatt goal sent “an important signal to industry and other state and federal agencies that California is committed to being a leader on offshore wind.”

“Achieving 5 GW of offshore wind by 2030 will position the state to meet and even exceed its 25 GW goal by 2045,” enthused OWC Executive Director Adam Stern in a press statement.

Taking note of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory study, OWC described a scenario in which California’s offshore wind industry could “support tens of thousands of jobs, supply over 15 percent of its current electricity needs, generate enough competitively priced power for at least 7 million homes, and produce tens of billion of dollars in GDP for the state by 2050.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom also chipped in his two cents. “California is home to one of the world’s best offshore wind resources in the world and I am confident that this clean, domestic source of electricity can play an important role in meeting our state’s growing need for clean energy,” Governor Newsom affirmed in a presentation cited by OWC.

Trump Loses In Court…

So much for 2022. Upon taking office for the second time in January of 2025, Trump tried and failed to stop offshore wind projects from moving forward along the East coast. He summarily suspended all new offshore leases in federal waters, held up others for ill-defined additional reviews, and issued stop-work orders halting five offshore projects that were already deep into the construction phase.

That didn’t last long. In December, a federal judge affirmed that Trump can use his authority to stop issuing new leases for offshore wind projects in federal waters, but he has no legal grounds for arbitrarily re-reviewing projects that already have leases and permits in hand. Earlier this year, a series of federal judges also affirmed that work could continue on the five under-construction projects Trump tried to stop.

Having been stymied in court, Trump then turned to bribery. In March he offered TotalEnergies almost $1 billion to voluntarily walk away from its two Atlantic coast offshore leases, setting a template for additional buyouts. The President’s Republican allies in Congress have let the matter stand but members on the Democratic side warned TotalEnergies the deal was illegal, and they have launched an investigation.

California Goes Global On Offshore Wind

None of this seems to concern the offshore wind industry and its supporters in California.  After all, it’s a big world out there. If Trump tries to obstruct the state’s federally issued offshore wind leases, California stakeholders still have plenty of opportunities to participate in the global industry. As underscored by OWC, the state is a member of the Global Offshore Wind Alliance, and it has already leveraged floating wind technology to form agreements with top offshore stakeholders including Norway, Scotland, Denmark, Japan, the UK, and China.

As for activity along the California coast, OWC is working under the assumption that Trump will fail to stop the industry from moving forward. Last week the organization hosted a global-facing wind industry summit in Long Beach, a key port city on the Pacific coast. In a recap of the event issued on May 20, OWC noted that next steps are already in motion including new investments in seaports and transmission infrastructure. OWC also listed supply chain scale-up and workforce training among other works in progress.

“California made important strides in 2025 on its plans to bring offshore wind online. Most notable was passage by State lawmakers of a $228 million first installment from the $475 million voters approved in Proposition 4 for port infrastructure to deploy floating wind turbines,” OWC noted.

OWC also described a $42.75 million CEC grant aimed at upgrading operations at the Ports of Humboldt, Long Beach, Oakland, Richmond, and San Luis.

“California secured its current offshore wind leases, located 20-30 miles off its coast and largely out of sight, in the 2022 federal lease sale for Pacific offshore wind that drew bids of $757 million from developers to deploy an initial 7-10 GW,” the organization reminds everyone.

They Write Letters

Having already gone down to defeat in the area of offshore wind, last month Trump also saw his plans for stopping onshore wind begin to fall apart, when a federal judge unlocked the President’s arbitrary freeze of new wind and solar permits on federal lands.

As a workaround, Trump effectively put a halt to routine onshore wind reviews that involve sign-offs from the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration. By some calculations, the bottleneck has halted 150 onshore wind projects in their tracks, many of them in Texas. “About $50 billion in wind investments and 150,000 jobs are imperiled by the Trump administration’s effective halt to approvals for new onshore projects,” Bloomberg reported on May 22, citing an estimate from the trade organization American Clean Power Association.

In response, 55 members of Congress signed off on a letter to the self proclaimed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, outlining all the normal procedural steps approved by Congress for coordinating federal agencies involved in the wind permitting process, which were ignored by the new order. Citing the American Clean Power Association, the letter asserts that almost 200 wind projects have been impacted by the bottleneck, putting a cumulative total of more than 30 gigawatts of new electricity capacity at risk of vanishing, at a cost of $361 billion over the next 25 years.

Ouch! The representatives who signed the letter are demanding a classified briefing on the matter. If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the discussion thread. Better yet, find your members of Congress and let them know what you think.

Photo: What war on wind turbines? Offshore wind stakeholders in California are moving forward with plans to develop 25 gigawatts by 2045, despite the sharp U-turn in federal energy policy (courtesy of GOWA).