Creating a path for offshore wind in California has been anything but easy since January 2016 when Trident Winds submitted the first formal lease request for an 800MW project in Morro Bay. One year later, former President Donald Trump took office.

From the start, relations were acrimonious between Trump, a Republican, and Governor Jerry Brown and later with successor Gavin Newsom, both Democrats. Beyond personal animosity, Trump made no attempt to hide his disdain for the state’s efforts to phase out fossil fuels, his clear preference over renewables.

Nevertheless, his administration in the first two years was surprisingly supportive of the nascent sector there and along the Atlantic coast — even as Trump continued to publicly slam the economics, reliability and aesthetics of onshore turbines, including bizarre rants about bird graveyards and false claims about wind power causing cancer.

The federal support for offshore wind rested with Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, who oversaw the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which regulates energy development on the outer continental. Zinke viewed offshore wind as an enormous “God-given” domestic resource opportunity that merited federal assistance.

In late 2018, BOEM issued a call for developers to submit “nominations of interest” for commercial leases in Humboldt Bay, Morro Bay, and another area BOEM proposed to the south called Diablo Canyon. There was a strong response from established players in Canada and Europe plus several US start-ups.

However, Zinke soon resigned amid a swirl of probes into his business dealings and conduct in office. David Bernhardt, his replacement, was a former oil & gas industry lobbyist. Over the next 23 months, there would not be another offshore wind lease sale and no project received a federal permit, leaving the industry in limbo.

In California, meanwhile, the US Navy opposed development in Diablo Canyon and most of Morro Bay as incompatible with its training and weapons testing operations. Without impetus from Trump, talks over several years between BOEM, the Pentagon and state failed to achieve a compromise.

Shortly before leaving power, the Trump White House sought to further undermine the sector. It announced a “historic milestone” whereby BOEM would begin environmental reviews for Humboldt and Morro Bay, a key step in the leasing process.

A closer look, however, revealed Morro Bay had been slashed in size to prevent large-scale developments that would keep costs affordable and help the state meet its ambitious clean energy mandates.

Biden’s White House quickly issued a directive not to publish the BOEM communique in the Federal Register, the official US government journal, effectively rendering the reviews null and void. Biden then quickly rejected the “zero-sum game” at play where the choice was between national defence and offshore wind. A settlement was only a matter of time.

Now, all federal agencies are on the same page in support of offshore wind as part of intensified US efforts to tackle climate change. “Finally, we have unlocked the potential for California,” said Necy Sumait, chief of renewable energy in the Pacific region at BOEM.

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