Floating wind turbines off California’s Central Coast? I say yes! | Opinion

Ginormous floating windmills are coming to California’s Central Coast. Each magnificent turbine’s blade will be half as long as a football field; generate many gigawatts of power; and be way out in the Pacific — so far that they can’t be anchored to the seafloor, but instead will essentially hold hands with each other.

True, there will be risks: Those blades will kill some birds; the noise will interfere with whales’ and dolphins’ ability to communicate and the project area lies at the kinetic interface between warm and cold water that raises nutrients from the depths and feeds all marine life. This, researchers warn, could be reduced by 10%.

I used to think Homo sapiens was a failed species: very good at increasing our numbers, at bending the world to our will, but with no way to stop and no way to effect the immediate about-face that climate scientists say we need to preserve the planet. But now I’ve seen the light: It’s all just engineering.

Opinion

These wind turbines could be situated closer to shore — like those operating in a dozen countries and two U.S. states. But 25 miles out, there’s more wind. And that means more free power.

Besides, Californians can’t be expected to endure seeing turbines from our windows. People say oil platforms ruined Santa Barbara. We must protect the view.

The other night, I had dinner with a friend who told me that when he stayed in an Airbnb in Italy, there was a limit on energy use. You could run the dishwasher while drying your laundry, but turn on the tea kettle and you’d trigger a blackout. That same night, the Arizona Diamondbacks were pursuing the league championship courtesy of industrial A/C. During the scorching 54-day summer stretch when Phoenix’s highs blazed over 110°F, Chase Field’s 1.3 million square feet chilled out at 78°. Someone’s got to provide those kilowatts!

Besides, it’s not just us cranking the greenhouse gases. Canada’s 2023 wildfires pumped out two billion tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of pollution from as many as 400 million U.S. cars. Recycling my yogurt cups can’t ever balance that out.

The kids say that the way to stop the forests from burning and the warm seas from inciting monster hurricanes is to consume less: fly less, drive less, stop buying things you use once and throw away. They just don’t understand. If we consume less, that’ll cost someone their job. And then they’ll consume less, and that’ll cost someone else their job and so on, until it comes down to our own job. Consumption drives the U.S. economy. Obviously, we can’t change that.

I do, however, worry about the whales, and about that 10% decrease in upwelling, which drives the ocean’s life cycles. I worry about what physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski calls “the blue machine” that supports all life on earth.

But humans are part of life on earth, too, and we need more and more energy every year. Bitcoin alone consumes 1,449 kilowatt hours per transaction (which sounds to me like it costs six months’ worth of my household’s electricity usage to move one bitcoin). We’re going to need armies of turbines to keep up with that.

So, to turbines I say yes, just not close too shore.

Still, I can’t say I feel great about maybe losing all the whales.

An Oprah-fan friend of mine has an idea: You get a turbine! And you! And you! Instead of sticking it to the whales, she proposes, we should put the turbines in each person’s front yard, sized to meet their consumption. If a homeowner prefers, they can have several in decreasing sizes, like those stick-figure decals on SUVs.

Super! But…I don’t know: That giant spinning blade wouldn’t create some weird electromagnetic field, would it? Or make a grating noise that could put a damper on getting frisky with my husband? Eating 10% less, though, might be useful.

One problem: I finally got my landscaping finished, and I’d hate to wreck the color scheme.

So, if the energy mega-corporations building the turbines tell us the whales will be fine, we simply have to believe them. And if the disruption to the upwelling starts destroying the ocean, they’ll just take the whole wind farm down, won’t they?

Meanwhile, we’ll have what we all secretly want: A “free” source of power too far away to see. Too distant to have to think about. Until it’s too late.

Bonnie Thompson is a writer and editor based in Los Osos; for the past 15 years, she has done habitat-restoration work at Sweet Springs Nature Preserve.