So I was checking out the Northern California and Southern Oregon Offshore Wind Transmission Study (vol. 1) and I found some interesting bits. Here’s one:

The northern Coast of California and the southern coast of Oregon have some of the best wind resources in the United States, and development of these resources can contribute to meeting the clean energy goals of California, Oregon, and other western states.

Yay for us! But there’s more:

Because the existing transmission grid infrastructure that serves these coastal regions is limited in capacity, major investments in new transmission grid infrastructure will be needed.

There’s always a catch. You have to get the electricity that the turbines generate off-shore to facilities on-shore. And once there the power has to be distributed to the grid. That’s going to take new transmission lines of the 500-kv size. They look like this:

We all know what it is like to travel to and from the Southern Oregon or Northern California coasts—mountains, rivers, canyons, and winding roads. New transmission lines there won’t have the wide-open spaces of the Western deserts like the photo above. It will be a more challenging undertaking. Speaking of that, here’s another bit:

We note that some of the necessary technologies for large-scale development of floating OSW power are neither fully developed nor commercially available at this time.

Well, then. Infrastructure is do-able. It will take a while (more on that later) but the primary technology is not ready. Yet. We all know that wind turbines work. And they work on land and on sea. Offshore wind power is big stuff in the UK, for example. They have developments in the North Sea that can deliver at a gigawatt scale. Unfortunately in the Northern California and Southern Oregon offshore regions slated for wind development the continental shelf plunges rapidly away from the shore. The water is too deep and thus you need floating platforms. That tech is still experimental.

To sum up:

The development of tens of gigawatts of floating OSW power generation on the West Coast will not occur quickly; a successful effort would take decades, and the associated transmission upgrades would also take place over decades.

All complex problems will require complex solutions. I found this material and related stuff at the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt.