Offshore Wind Towers – Pacific Maritime Magazine

Offshore Wind Update 2022

A lot has happened since the Biden administration in May 2021 announced that California’s northern and central coasts would be open to offshore wind development, identifying two areas in particular: Morro Bay and Humboldt Call. The idea was to pursue the development of floating offshore wind platforms off the California coast as part of the Biden administration’s overall goal of generating 30 gigawatts of domestic offshore wind by 2030. The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is the lead agency on offshore wind. This past May, the department announced offshore wind lease sales for the first…

Offshore Wind Towers Make for Dangerous Seas

Maritime vessel operators need to be aware of new and heightened concerns about how offshore wind (OSW) towers can interfere with and degrade radar systems. Mariners can be impacted on at least two fronts, one being interference with marine vessel radar. According to a report released earlier this year by the National Academy of Sciences, wind towers undercut a radar’s central purpose: safety. The steel towers can distort information about a vessel’s relative location, a degradation that affects all vessel classes. Turbine blades clutter a radar’s display, resulting in an ambiguous and confusing picture for the operator. Correcting for these…