The Trump administration has hit a new low in its crusade against renewable energy. It will pay two wind farm developers hundreds of millions of dollars to walk away from viable clean energy projects. One of them, Golden State Wind\u2019s 2-gigawatt project off Morro Bay, could have powered 1.1 million California homes.<\/p>\n
The Interior Department will pay $885 million to the two companies.<\/a>\u00a0Making matters worse, the companies must spend their windfalls on what the department calls \u201creliable conventional energy.\u201d That is code for oil and gas.<\/p>\n This follows a similar deal in March paying $928 million to a French-owned company to abandon leases off New York and North Carolina.<\/p>\n These payoffs are the president\u2019s personal pique posing as public policy.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump\u2019s hostility toward wind power goes back at least 20 years. In 2006, he bought a stretch of Scottish coastline for a golf resort and soon learned that the Scots planned an offshore wind farm that would sit in the course\u2019s sea views.\u00a0He complained<\/a>, \u201cI want to see the ocean, I do not want to see windmills.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump sued. He lost, appealed and lost again \u2014 all the way up to the U.K. Supreme Court<\/a>. The turbines went up.<\/p>\n His antipathy toward wind power continues in the White House. He tried to halt all wind permitting with an executive order issued on his first day back in office. A federal judge struck that down.<\/p>\n Now he throws money at it, preferably other people\u2019s, to get what he wants. In addition to the payoffs for canceled leases, his administration withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars meant to fund offshore wind projects, including $427 million pledged to Humboldt Bay.<\/p>\n Rep. Jared Huffman<\/a>, D-San Rafael,\u00a0has rightly called the latest deal \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201calmost certainly unlawful.\u201d The problem is that it is far from clear that anyone has legal standing to file a lawsuit against the payoffs. Huffman instead hopes that the Government Accountability Office will investigate whether the administration tapped improper funds for the payoffs.<\/p>\n Legalities and Trump\u2019s personal disdain for wind power aside, these moves will make it all the harder for the nation and California to meet rising energy demands, let alone meet them responsibly.<\/p>\n The California Energy Commission predicts that\u00a0peak electricity demand will increase by 42% to 61% by 2045<\/a>. Data centers, electric vehicles and building electrification are driving that increase. But where will that electricity come from without aggressively deploying every clean source available, including wind power?<\/p>\n And that\u2019s just baseline growth in demand. If Californians hope to retire Diablo Canyon, the state\u2019s last nuclear plant, and phase out in-state oil production, the state will need even more power to replace those lost sources.<\/p>\n An all-of-the-above clean energy strategy is essential. Solar, battery storage, wind on land and sea, and geothermal power all should be part of the mix. Indeed, geothermal might be California\u2019s quiet advantage, and the North Bay is an epicenter for it.<\/p>\n The Geysers, which sits on the border of Sonoma and Lake counties, is the world\u2019s largest geothermal complex. Constellation Energy\u2019s\u00a0$26.6 billion acquisition Geyers company Calpine\u00a0brings deep-pocketed new ownership to the field<\/a>. Meanwhile,\u00a0Sonoma County won $1.36 million in state funding\u00a0to map the best sites for next-generation geothermal, and Sonoma Clean Power\u2019s\u00a0GeoZone initiative<\/a>\u00a0seeks to add 600 megawatts to the 725 megawatts already produced there.<\/p>\n California must continue to build for its future energy needs, even if the president pays energy developers to walk away.<\/p>\n