President Joe Biden’s launch in late May of plans to award leases for the first gigawatts of floating wind power off California immediately puts the US at the forefront of the global sector, offering the kind of scale needed to help make deepwater moored turbines cost-competitive with their bottom-fixed offshore counterparts.

The White House is targeting a lead-off lease auction in mid-2022 for an area near Morro Bay off the central California coast that can support 3GW of installations, and another 1.6GW