CFACT Comments on the California Offshore Wind Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
February 15th, 2025
CFACT Comments on the California Offshore Wind Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
By Craig Rucker, President
CFACT
https://www.cfact.org/Submitted to
https://www.regulations.gov/document/BOEM-2023-0061-0189February 12, 2025
Overview of our concerns
BOEM is taking comments on a draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for its five floating wind offshore leases off the California coast. This is BOEM’s second offshore wind PEIS. The first was for a set of leases off New York which featured fixed bottom turbines. This is the first PEIS for floating wind turbines which are very different from the fixed turbines being built along the Atlantic coast.
Floating wind is still an immature technology with a large number of proposed designs none of which has been tested at commercial utility scale. There are just a handful of small demonstration scale projects in the world.
There are at least two useful things about this PEIS. First is a pretty good tutorial on floating wind with a focus on the California case. This is Appendix A, done by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. They rule out a number of design options including the most popular that has been demonstrated, the spar floater. The huge range of options they present shows the immaturity of the technology
Second the PEIS includes an encyclopedic discussion of numerous potential adverse impacts of a generic floating wind project. These impacts are limited to just what is contemplated for each of the five leases so when combined for all five leases it is clear that this Program will be environmentally destructive. These adverse impacts cannot be mitigated so the correct decision is that the Program should not proceed. The No Action Alternative is the proper choice.
Here is just a short list of some of the major flaws in the PEIS
https://www.cfact.org/2025/02/15/cfact-comments-on-the-california-offshore-wind-draft-programmatic-environmental-impact-statement-peis/
