[music] -These are all big modern machines.

These all are fully robotic devices.

You look up on the back, you will actually see a stalk that extends upward on the back of the nacelle.

That's its weather station.

It's measuring the wind speed and the wind direction 24/7.

The robotic controller is taking action and turning the entire nacelle, the head up there, and turning it to face into the wind.

These machines are pretty funny to watch on a low wind day because you can actually see it trying to find the wind.

It will continuously change the direction it's facing, waiting for the winds to exceed 7 miles an hour, which is what it takes to actually get started.

We are in the San Gorgonio Pass.

This is near the city of Palm Springs.

Here in the pass, we have a fair amount of wind that's normally set up by the cold ocean climate to the west and the hotter desert climate to the east.

That just creates a pressure difference that tends to pull the air through the mountain pass.

It makes it a great place for a wind farm.

We're only about 10% of the wind energy, but we can power, on average, about 750,000 homes when the wind is blowing, 250,000 homes when it's averaged over the course of a year.

That's a third of Riverside County.

We make more power than the needs of Palm Springs by a factor of 10 every year, and in fact, this entire Coachella Valley, by a factor of 3.

-I think nothing else has quite the potential that wind energy has, and that's really because wind is an already established, a long-established, renewable energy technology.

We know how to build it.

It's really quite straightforward.

It's hard to imagine California reaching its clean energy goals without really investing in building out wind power going forward.

[music] -In general, wind energy, I think, has a lot of problems compared to many other sources of energy.

If you put even land-based wind against photovoltaic energy, photovoltaic energy wins easily.

The solar is remarkable, the way it's expanded in the last 10 years.

That's going to change the economics of wind energy.

We talk frequently about how conventional energy, natural gas-generated electricity, is getting beaten by solar.

Well, so is wind.

You have to look at it in a comparative way.

-One of the most important things when we think about transitioning the electric grid to clean electricity is actually just having a diversity of resources.

One of the things that wind can do that solar can't do is generate electricity when the sun isn't shining, which seems like an obvious thing to say.

There are periods where solar production is quite low, when it's cloudy outside for potentially days at a time, and during those periods of time, wind energy can keep cranking, can keep producing electricity.

For California specifically, right now, wind is actually a relatively small but pretty important part of California's clean energy mix.

In all of the planning to reach the state's clean energy goals, wind energy would roughly triple to get to those goals.

Tripling from now to 2045, the amount of wind energy we have, is a pretty daunting task, but it'll be an important part of transitioning the state to clean electricity.

-Offshore, the wind conditions are significantly stronger.

Very strong winds offshore, very consistent winds offshore.

The challenge in California is going to be, how are you going to build these wind farms when you have deep water channels off our coast?

These turbines are going to be floating.

You're going to have to bring that power onshore, which means you have a floating substation.

This is all beyond my pay grade, but it is a challenge that the industry is facing today.

The state of California is planning offshore wind by 2045.

It is part of the state's plan.

[music] [background conversations] -Here in the city of Long Beach, we believe in offshore wind.

We are not turning back.

We are going to play our part to make sure it becomes a reality here in California, and we believe in it.

-The Port of Long Beach is one of the busiest ports in the nation.

We want to support the state's development of floating offshore wind by being an assembly hub for those turbines.

For floating offshore wind, you need to assemble those turbines at a port before they're towed out to the wind farms.

It is very difficult to find suitable sites on the west coast for that assembly operation.

The Port of Long Beach has unique qualities that can meet that need.

We are proposing to build out a new purpose-built facility for the assembly of those turbines.

The facility is called PURE WIND.

It's specifically designed for the assembly of floating offshore wind turbines.

-There are two main spots where offshore wind is being considered in California.

The first is along the central coast of California, and there's also another spot on the north coast of California near Humboldt Bay where offshore wind is being considered.

One of the challenges with building out offshore wind at a big scale in California is actually building up that infrastructure on land, building up the ports and all of that infrastructure that would enable the offshore wind industry to install those turbines out in the water.

I'd say the biggest obstacle is probably the uncertainty that's been cast over the industry by the current administration's attacks on offshore wind.

-We're clear-eyed about the current federal environment, but PURE WIND is being built for California's long-term energy future, not for a single lease or a single year.

This type of infrastructure takes a long time to build.

We're moving forward with the things that we control.

Our job is to ensure that California has that capability ready when it's needed.

-They want to put them 20 miles offshore.

20 miles offshore in California is 4,000 feet of water.

A 12-megawatt turbine is going to stand from the waterline to the tip of the rotor in a vertical position at least 800 to 1,000 feet.

That's an Eiffel Tower.

Are you really seriously considering putting 2,000 floating towers in the ocean that are almost 1,000 feet high each, and you're going to tether each of them to water that's 4,000 feet deep?

There's a lot of things that could go wrong if you do that, and the cost is just ridiculous.

It would be about $180 billion just to procure and install them.

It'd be another $12 billion to upgrade the port infrastructure.

Another $36 billion to upgrade the transmission lines.

It's the most expensive way to produce electricity in the world.

-There are some unknowns with floating offshore wind, but the nice thing is it leverages technology from oil and gas.

We know a lot about these floating platforms and the anchor systems.

We know how that functions out in the open ocean.

It's less about, "Hey, we don't think this technology is going to work," or there's a question around whether it's going to work.

It's about how do we make it commercial scale?

-This place has been here going on 50 years.

If I come back in 50 years, is there still energy being generated by wind turbines here?

-[chuckles] I think there's going to be wind energy being generated in this mountain pass for a very, very long time.

We have seen some repowering happen recently.

Repowering is the process of taking those old windmills out and replacing them with new ones.

We still have a lot of room out here to take the old ones out and put big new ones up.

Let's get as much electricity from wind as we can.

[music]