Wake up California, Trump is coming for your offshore wind industry

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Surely, I wasn’t the only one in the room thinking to him or herself: Wait, they remember that Donald Trump is the president, right?

Last Friday, the California Energy Commission and Port of Long Beach hosted a symposium on ports and offshore wind in the Long Beach City Council chambers. A crowd of several hundred representatives from government agencies, ports, labor unions, project developers, and tribes were there to get an update on the status of floating offshore wind deployment in the state – the first event of its kind in California since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

The problem? The agenda seemed as if designed six months ago and left unchanged for the incoming Harris-Walz administration.

The afternoon sessions included an hour-long infomercial for building and construction trade union locals and an environmental justice-themed panel on "working together to improve port communities.”

Don’t get me wrong, floating wind projects offshore California should absolutely be constructed by local union labor, with care taken to avoid the negative impacts large energy projects have historically imposed on fenceline neighborhoods.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There first needs to be certainty that these projects are actually going to be built. And yet, speaker after speaker throughout the day suggested that California could simply wait Trump out.

It’s true that construction was not likely to begin on California’s first floating offshore wind farms until after Trump leaves office in January 2029 – if he does leave office. But even that timeline is predicated on milestones being met in the interim: project developers finishing the required environmental reviews, filing construction and operations plans, and securing all necessary state and federal permits.

Much of this work at the federal level was put at risk by Trump’s January 20 memorandum stating that federal agencies “shall not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects pending the completion of a comprehensive assessment and review of Federal wind leasing and permitting practices.” With respect to existing leases, the memo "instructs the Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with the Attorney General as needed, to conduct a review of the economic and environmental necessity of terminating or amending such leases, 'identifying any legal bases for [the removal of such existing leases]," notes attorneys at the White & Case law firm. The memo does not provide a deadline for the offshore wind review.

But the threat extends beyond Trump trying to cancel the existing leases held by the five winners of the auction for wind lease areas offshore California held in December 2022 – three offshore Morro Bay on the Central Coast and two offshore Humboldt County in Northern California.

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation, and Conservation District a $427 million grant funded in part by Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to build a heavy-lift marine terminal to support offshore wind deployment. But based on the Trump administration’s early efforts to freeze clean energy and climate funding from the BIL and the Inflation Reduction Act, there is no guarantee the administration won’t try to claw back the money.

A few months later, in April 2024, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced plans to hold a second California offshore wind lease sale in 2028 – a sale unlikely to take place while Trump is in office. Without a series of lease sales on the calendar, project developers may not be willing to make the infrastructure and supply chain investments that will be required to sustain a thriving floating offshore wind industry in the state.

Is California prepared to fight?

If Trump does move to cancel California's active offshore wind leases in the coming months, what is the state prepared to do about it?

What I heard last Friday wasn’t reassuring.

The strongest rhetoric of the day on the looming fight with Trump came from Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis (D), who said, “There’s nothing that they can throw at us that can stop us.”

To ease uncertainty and reassure investors and project developers, the organizers should have scrapped a symposium agenda that was so discordant with the high-stakes political moment.

Instead, Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) should have been in Long Beach to state plainly that California is ready to fight the Trump administration in court to protect its offshore wind industry. Governor Gavin Newsom (D) could have used the event to announce a deal with Democratic leaders in the Legislature to boost investment in offshore wind infrastructure beyond the $475 million allocated for the industry in the $10 billion climate bond approved by voters last November.

In short, show Trump that California won’t be bullied.

Offshore wind represents one of the most promising economic growth opportunities on the horizon for California in the coming decades – especially for Humboldt County. It’s time for California’s leaders to show Trump the state is ready to put up a fight worthy of the world’s fifth-largest economy.