The plan for a massive ocean sanctuary off the central coast of California has cleared one of its final hurdles. But there’s a twist: Offshore wind developers would traverse the same blue waters under a plan rolled out Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If given the final go-ahead, the proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary would be a big leap by the Biden administration toward its goal of conserving 30 percent of U.S. ocean waters by the end of the decade. But the legacy designation for President Joe Biden is in some conflict with another major piece of the environmental policy puzzle — vastly increasing U.S. offshore wind power to help meet Biden’s zero-carbon energy goals. The wind projects by Equinor, Golden State Wind and Invenergy California Offshore need to cross the waters to connect the electrons to California’s onshore grid. It’s something both the Biden administration and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom support. The new plan — the first-ever proposed by a tribal nation — for the roughly 4,500-square-mile sanctuary has a solution to the problem … maybe. The agency left a wide corridor for developers to plug into the grid at the shuttered Morro Bay power station and the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, both north of Santa Barbara. Those locations have the grid infrastructure, with potential upgrades to handle an influx of electricity shipments. In a statement, White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi leaned heavily on the idea that tribes, California and the feds worked together to reach a solution. “This Administration’s conservation vision is locally led, centers environmental justice, and recognizes that we can meet both our conservation and clean energy goals at the same time,” he said in a statement. But the Northern Chumash Tribe that proposed the sanctuary in 2015 has pushed NOAA to honor the original boundary, sans corridor. They proposed a compromise, with the support of the wind developers and California lawmakers Reps. Salud Carbajal and Julia Brownley along with Sen. Alex Padilla, all Democrats, to designate the sanctuary in phases. Phase one can include the corridor. But the groups want NOAA to expand the boundary after the wind projects have advanced. NOAA nodded to that idea Friday, promising to “consider” an expansion once the wind projects are further along. The Chumash final designation is expected later this year.
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