Green energy activists have set their sights on a small county in Northern California for the construction of a massive offshore wind farm that is estimated to cost billions.
The 10-year construction project is currently planned for Humboldt Bay in Humboldt County, about 300 miles north of San Francisco.
Officials are hoping to transform Humboldt Bay’s once massive logging port into a hub for floating offshore wind power, helping the state reach its clean energy goal by 2045.
And if it works, they are estimating it could make up somewhere between 10%-15% of the state’s clean energy.
The project is expected to last more than a decade as the area will have to construct hundreds of wind towers as tall as the Eiffel Tower that will then be sent out to float in the bay, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Giant cranes will also help to assemble the towers, changing the look of the harbor for years to come.
The technology for the project is only in the early stages, as no one has ever tried to build a floating wind turbine farm in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.
While the wind turbine towers will be on a floating platform, they still must be secured to the ocean floor. In the waters 20-60 miles offshore in Humboldt Bay, that means securing wires between 1,600 to 4,200 feet down in the ocean.
According to the report, that is more than 10 times deeper in the water than it’s been successfully tried in places such as Scotland and Norway.
Those wires then will send the electricity to the ground which will be transmitted back to the shore through some 400 hundreds miles of transmission lines.
The engineering aspects of the project, must also account for those lines to be loose and strong enough to withstand the ocean’s strong currents.
Chris Mikkelsen, executive director of the Humboldt Bay Harbor District, spoke bout how the area was unique in its ability to meet the needed requirements to pull off such a task.
Those include having the land for constructing the giant turbines, a protected bay with deep channels, and an entrance large enough for ships.
Development director Rob Holmlund added that there’s really only two places in California where this could happen, and Humboldt Bay is better suited due to the faster wind that comes through the area.
“It’s only Humboldt and Long Beach,” Holmlund said. “So it’s a super bonus that we have great wind out our back door.”
Already the project has hit a snag, after the Trump administration pulled $427 million in federal funding from the Humboldt Bay project. Trump has made it clear he’s not going to support wind projects.
Speaking to the press in January 2026, Trump said “we will not approve windmills.”
It is unclear at this time exactly how much the entire project will cost. One Schatz Energy Resarch Center report set the real life time estimated total cost of the Humboldt transmission project at more than $5 billion. The work is being done by the Chicago-based Viridon, who won the project.
However, not all residents and tribes in Humboldt Bay and the close town of Eureka are on board with the project.
According to a recent survey by Schatz and Oregon University, 37% are in favor, while 44% are unsure and 19% opposed the wind farm.
Ruth Wortman, from the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria, expressed concern about what all the dredging and digging will do to the whales, salmon, abalone and kelp that frequent the area.
“This is just another battle to fight,” Wortman said. “We just got the dams removed on the Klamath, and now you want to put another destructive life cycle interrupter in our ocean.”
But officials with another tribe in the area, Blue Lake Rancheria, have thrown their support behind the project, according to the Shatz report.
“The Blue Lake Rancheria recognizes the urgency of the climate crisis and intends to leverage their knowledge and resources to continue to advance clean energy innovations,” Heidi Moore-Guynup, Director of Tribal and Government Affairs at the Blue Lake Rancheria (BLR) said in the report.
“At the same time, BLR understands the imperative need to coordinate scientific inquiry and research and believes that Traditional Ecological Knowledge must be part of such inquiry.”
The town that will be most impacted is the little city of Samoa, which according to the latest census report has a population of just over 150 people.
It sits on the bay where the giant 1,000 feet turbines will be erected until they are towed out into the ocean.
Vanessa Coolidge, 40, told the Times she doesn’t think anyone is listening to her concerns about the osprey nests that would need to be relocated for the massive project.
Others have said that they aren’t convinced their town is the best place for such an undertaking.
“I do want clean air and I do want clean water, and I recognize that we need solutions,” Tina Manos, 69, said. “Wind, I think, will have a place. The question is, is this the best place for it?”
At this point, officials say they are focusing on the onshore work that must first be done, before they worry about the federal response to it, hoping that in a few years, there’s a more favorable clean energy leader in the White House.
Last year, state officials told the outlet that it “isn’t backing down” on the plans, either.
The post reached out to the California Energy Commission, the Pacific Offshore Wind Consortium and the Humboldt Bay Harbor District for further comment.
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