The Biden administration will advance a proposal Friday for a massive marine sanctuary off the California coast that leaves room for offshore wind transmission, according to several people familiar with the announcement.
The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary would be the first Indigenous-proposed sanctuary in the U.S, representing a legacy act for President Joe Biden months before he leaves office. It would also be a significant step for his administration’s aim to conserve 30 percent of U.S. oceans by 2030.
The sanctuary’s final proposed boundaries, which will be detailed in an environmental impact analysis released Friday morning, would cover a wide swath of central California’s coast, roughly from Gaviota, California, to north of Santa Barbara. The sanctuary would not connect to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, as was initially proposed in 2015 by the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.
Instead, NOAA is planning to leave a corridor on the northern side of the sanctuary so a trio of offshore wind developers can plug their future wind farms into interconnection points on the California coast, according to two sources granted anonymity to discuss the not-yet-public analysis.
NOAA did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The agency released a proposed sanctuary boundary last year that included 5,617 square miles of coastal waters. The proposal left a corridor for wind transmission to connect to the shore at Morro Bay, the site of a retired power plant.
But in a quandary for the Biden administration, developers later raised concerns that their projects would be in jeopardy without more access to the grid, while the Northern Chumash wanted Morro Bay and surrounding waters included in the sanctuary.
It’s unclear how NOAA will respond to a compromise proposed by the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and offshore wind developers. Under that proposal, NOAA would initially leave open a corridor to let offshore wind developers connect to the onshore grid — but would later expand the sanctuary to those waters once the wind projects have advanced.
The sanctuary, if finalized later this year, will likely sit next to some of California’s first offshore wind projects. California aims to install as much as 25 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2045.
The Biden administration sold just over 240,000 acres off the coast of Morro Bay to three offshore wind developers in 2022, in its first-ever offshore wind auction in the Pacific Ocean. Because the waters off the Pacific coast are deep, developers will have to place turbines on floating platforms, secured to the sea floor with mooring cables.
The novel technology has raised criticism from some tribal groups on the Pacific coast and fishermen, who say its impacts to marine habitats are still unclear.
White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters in a call Wednesday that the proposed Chumash sanctuary is proof that offshore wind — a signature piece of Biden’s climate agenda — can exist alongside other values like conservation.
“We’ve, I think, shown time and time again, we can do it all,” he said. “We can do it with all of the key stakeholders at the center of the process, whether it’s the tribes in the Chumash process, whether it’s the unions that you’ve seen. … Time and time again, we’ve been able to pursue all of those values and do it successfully.”
P.J. Webb, an advocate for the Chumash sanctuary who helped write and edit the Northern Chumash’s nomination, said the sanctuary will be an accomplishment more than a decade in the making.
It is also key to the Biden administration’s 30×30 initiative to conserve U.S. waters, Webb said. Biden signed an executive order during his first year in office that set a goal to conserve 30 percent of U.S. lands and fresh water and 30 percent of U.S. oceans by the end of the decade.
“This is exactly what that policy was supposed to bring about,” Webb said.
The Chumash sanctuary would be the first sanctuary in the U.S. nominated by a Native American tribe. The Northern Chumash Tribe does not have federal recognition but is a recognized tribe in California.
Northern Chumash Tribal Council Chair Violet Sage Walker, whose late father first proposed the sanctuary, said it will be a testament to the diversity of Native American tribes and the Northern Chumash’s history.
“It’s really an honor to my dad and the work that he did and the people that came before that. People all around the world will be saying the word and the name Chumash,” she said.
Reporter Garrett Downs contributed.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
