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CALIFORNIA: Coastal Commission greenlights surveys for Morro Bay offshore wind energy development

June 10, 2022 — The California Coastal Commission is allowing the proposed Morro Bay wind energy development a path forward.

In a unanimous vote on Wednesday, commissioners accepted a staff report that laid out certain conditions the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) must follow as it allows wind energy developers to survey the Morro Bay site for potential construction of floating wind turbines.

This means that the Coastal Commission determined those survey activities are consistent with the California Coastal Act, the law the commission is charged with upholding. The law mandates the protection of coastal resources and “the economic, commercial and recreational importance of fishing activities,” among other things.

Site assessment activities may include the placement of ocean buoys with data collection equipment and an expected 873 boat trips in the wind energy area over three years, according to the Coastal Commission.

Read the full story at the San Luis Obispo Tribune

CALIFORNIA: Process for offshore wind energy lease auction outlined

June 7, 2022 — A task force on renewable energy in California, as well as members of the public, last week heard how credits will be assigned to bidders in a lease auction of offshore tracts to develop wind-powered systems that could generate up to 3 gigawatts of electricity.

More than 300 people — most of them from companies related to the power generation industry — attended the online meeting of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s California Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force.

An update on the lease sales included a timeline to the online auction scheduled for this fall and an explanation of various plans bidders will have to submit and credits that can be granted for their plans to support the workforce and mitigate impacts.

Some task force members from Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties expressed concerns over project effects on a proposed national marine sanctuary and the low percentage of credits for mitigating impacts.

Amanda Lefton, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said seven lease sales are planned by 2025, including off the coasts of New York and the Carolinas, with a goal of producing 30 gigawatts of power by 2030.

Read the full story at the Santa Maria Times

The Hail Mary Hatcheries

June 3, 2022 — The Russian River represents one possible future—perhaps the most likely one—for many other rivers on the west coast of North America: they will have hatchery salmon or no salmon at all. In this heavily developed watershed, climate change is already escalating droughts, fires, and floods, providing a preview of what may be in store for other regions. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that facilities like Warm Springs, often described as “conservation hatcheries,” can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. It’s a task that sometimes verges on the impossible. As Mariska Obedzinski, who has led California Sea Grant’s coho monitoring program in the Russian River for almost 18 years, puts it, “It can feel like one step forward and five steps back.”

Hatcheries hold up a mirror to the stubborn belief that salmon can exist without intact habitat. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in places where logged, dammed, and developed watersheds can no longer support abundant runs. But can salmon raised in captivity really replace wild ones? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for years, and, full disclosure, I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a consortium of salmon conservationists encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat, rather than build more hatcheries.

By the mid-20th century, scientists were finding evidence that artificially propagated fish were struggling to survive in the wild. “There is something wrong with hatchery trout,” a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist wrote in 1948, suggesting that the fish—close cousins to salmon—were becoming domesticated. Today, hatchery salmon are generally bigger, bolder, and more combative than wild salmon; when produced by the tens or hundreds of thousands, they can outcompete wild fish. Paradoxically, though, nearly all hatchery salmon die quickly from poor life skills—failure to avoid predators or to successfully find food—or succumb to stress in the strange new environment. One facility manager told me that his coho had consumed bits of wood after release, likely mistaking the fragments for commercial feed pellets. “Hatchery fish are animals that are dressed in the skin of the salmon, but they’re missing most of what makes a salmon a salmon,” says Jim Lichatowich, a retired fish biologist and author of Salmon Without Rivers. “They don’t have that 10,000-year study of one place.”

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

 

Five California offshore wind leases proposed

May 27, 2022 — Five areas totaling 373,268 acres off central and northern California are proposed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for the first West Coast offshore wind energy lease auction.

The proposed sale notice, to be published May 31 in the Federal Register, will kick off a 60-day public comment period. Three lease areas are proposed for the Morro Bay wind energy area off the central cost and two in the northern Humboldt area.

“Today’s action represents tangible progress towards achieving the Administration’s vision for a clean energy future offshore California, while creating a domestic supply chain and good-paying union jobs,” said BOEM Director Amanda Lefton in announcing the plan. “BOEM is committed to robust stakeholder engagement and ensuring any offshore wind leasing is done in a manner that avoids or minimizes potential impacts to the ocean and ocean users.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Study finds California shellfish farmers burdened by bureaucracy

May 24, 2022 — A study on shellfish farmers in the U.S. state of California, conducted by researchers at Oregon State University, found that farmers need additional resources and less red tape in order to overcome current and future environmental challenges.

Farmers from California’s Humboldt Bay, Point Reyes, and the Central Coast were interviewed for the study, which also involved researchers from San Diego State University.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

California unveils largest U.S. offshore wind target

May 11, 2022 — California energy officials have released a draft of the West Coast’s first road map for offshore wind, calling for more gigawatts of electricity from the resource than any other U.S. state to date.

In a report made public Friday, the California Energy Commission staff recommended building 3 GW of offshore wind by 2030, followed by a larger wave of development in subsequent years. By 2045, staff found, the state should produce anywhere from 10 GW to 15 GW from turbines located off its coast, enough to power roughly 10 million to 15 million homes.

Implementing the state goals also would mean tangling with other ocean users ranging from fishermen and shipping interests to the Department of Defense and marine conservation authorities, acknowledged CEC staff in the report.

The Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), which represents fishermen, recently sued Interior for approving what would be the first utility-scale offshore wind in the country, off the coast of Massachusetts.

One RODA affiliate in California, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), said yesterday that the national process for siting offshore projects has been “a failure” and does not bode well for fair treatment of the fishing industry.

Mike Conroy, executive director of the PCFFA, said in an email that he believed California’s explicit goals for offshore wind production, if finalized, “essentially forces Agencies to approve a certain number of projects regardless of their impacts on fisheries, marine ecosystems, the environment, coastal communities, disadvantaged communities, and ratepayers.”

“As a result, there is a huge importance, from a process standpoint, of setting these goals since they dictate the downstream review process,” Conroy wrote.

Read the full story at E&E News

US West Coast lawmakers want USDA to buy more seafood from their states

May 11, 2022 — A group of Democratic U.S. senators and representatives from West Coast states have written a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calling on his agency to spend more on seafood purchases from producers in their states.

The letter notes that California, Oregon, and Washington state produce more than USD 500 million (EUR 473.6 million) worth of seafood annually, more than an eighth of total domestic production in the U.S., and 25 percent of the country’s processing and wholesale jobs are located in the three Pacific Coast states.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

Farms, fish on dry California-Oregon border see scant water

April 12, 2022 — Farms that rely on irrigation from a depleted, federally managed lake on the California-Oregon border, along with a Native American tribe fighting to protect fragile salmon, will both receive extremely limited amounts of water this summer as a historic drought and record-low reservoir levels drag on in the U.S. West.

More than 1,000 farmers and ranchers who draw water from a 257-mile-long (407-kilometer) river that flows from the Upper Klamath Lake to the Pacific Ocean will have access to roughly one-seventh the amount they could get in a wetter year, a federal agency announced Monday. Downstream salmon will receive about half the water they’d get if the reservoir was full.

It’s the third year in a row that severe drought has impacted farmers, fish and tribes in a region where there’s not enough water to satisfy competing demands. Last year, no water at all flowed through the Klamath Reclamation Project’s main irrigation canal, and thousands of downstream juvenile salmon died without reservoir releases to support the Klamath River’s health.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

 

As drought puts growing strains on fish, hatcheries serve as lifelines for California salmon

April 11, 2022 — When Shasta Dam was built on the Sacramento River in the 1940s, the government also established Coleman National Fish Hatchery about 30 miles away on the tributary Battle Creek, aiming to make up for the loss of upstream habitat by raising fish for release.

The hatchery’s staff runs an elaborate spawning operation that this year is raising 12 million fall-run Chinook salmon, supporting California’s commercial and recreational fisheries. The hatchery also raises other types of salmon and steelhead.

The adult salmon swim up the Sacramento River and into Battle Creek, then up a fish ladder to the hatchery’s holding ponds. Mechanical screens in the water are used to move the fish to the spawning building.

The fish are placed into a bath with carbon-dioxide in the water, which enables the staff to handle them. Workers lift the salmon from the water in nets, check to see that they’re ready for spawning, and separate females from males.

They club the fish and send them sliding down a metal chute. One worker hangs each female salmon from a hook, inserts a needle in its abdomen and sends air flowing to push out the eggs, which land in a colander. Another worker grabs each male fish and twists the tail, squeezing out milt that will fertilize the eggs.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

Dungeness crab fishery along California coast closed due to whale entanglements

April 8, 2022 — All commercial Dungeness crab fishery along California’s coast will be closed this month after humpback whales were found entangled in fishing gear, wildlife authorities said.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced Wednesday that fishery zones from the Sonoma-Mendocino county life north to the Oregon state line will close at noon on April 20. The closure comes after the department had already announced that commercial crab traps would have to be removed from fishery zones from the Sonoma-Mendocino county line down south to the U.S.-Mexico border by Friday.

“We received reports of additional humpback whale entanglements and moved quickly to close the fishery to protect migrating humpback whales that are just starting to return to California waters,” said Director Bonham.

Read the full story at KRON4

 

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