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Comment by seabj0rn | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems with offshore wind in the US is the depth of the ocean off the coasts of areas that actually have high wind. It's like God gave the middle finger to the US in this regard but it's something technology could potentially solve for. Much of the eastern US coastline has huge drop offs not far off the coast of windy areas. You need a max depth of ~50 meters for a good sized turbine to be installed. Florida is one of the most viable places but alas, not very windy.

Compare this to Northwestern Europe in this map: https://www.britannica.com/place/Atlantic-Ocean It makes England/Nordics/Benelux the Saudi Arabia of wind power!

I don't know much about the potential for California though. Has it not been invested in due to seismic risks? Or is it mainly a factor of coastal homeowners lobbying against it?

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The US has a huge "wind belt" from the Texas panhandle north to Canada.[1] Big, flat open spaces where there are roads. Higher winds are available in the mountains, but installation and maintenance gets expensive. HVDC lines to Texas, the West Coast, and the Midwest will be needed to exploit that power.

California has four good on-land wind areas, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Time to look elsewhere.

[1] https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/08/us_wi...

There's an HVDC line that intends to colocate along railroad right of way to route from Iowa to Illinois [1] to get clean wind power to load centers. Lots of railroad right of way [2] to get renewable generation to load centers. Throw some fiber down while you’re at it, we can always use more fiber everywhere.

[1] https://www.soogreenrr.com/

[2] http://www.mapattacks.com/2015/01/who-owns-americas-rail-inf...

California has a much steeper drop off than the continental shelf in the Atlantic.

The floating Hywind turbines are tethered to a sea floor depth of 130m, but this technology is fairly recent for wind turbines.

Here’s a recent study on the potential off the California coast:

https://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/news_releases/2020/september...

There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California, so one would think that it would be straightforward to add wind. However the laws are such that existing practice is privileged and allowed, and changes are easily challenged by only a tiny number of people. So we will see if CA is able to deploy anything new off the coast.

> There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California

There was a lot of offshore drilling before 1969, before blow-out protectors were required, until one big spill at the cusp of the environmental movement turned most of the California coast against oil drilling, and anything like it offshore, even, ironically, off-shore wind farms - for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill#M...

Ironic considering they still pull oil out of the ground in the middle of residential neighborhoods in LA

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