The ocean management plan identifies three locations (one in federal waters adjacent to the planning area) for commercial-scale wind that are considered provisional sites. These areas passed the exclusionary screening process but appear to have potentially more significant technical limitations, cumulative impacts, and/or less suitability for wind energy. Therefore, these locations are not proposed for designation as Wind Energy Areas at this time, and are not currently being explored for further feasibility by the Commonwealth. This does not preclude other entities from developing additional information and analysis for the provisional sites, but such assessments would be subject to review by EEA, and designation of any or all of the provisional sites in the planning area as Wind Energy Areas would require a modification to the ocean management plan consistent with the formal amendment process.
To allow for consistent evaluation and comparison of a variety of datasets with distinct spatial resolutions, accuracies, and other characteristics, the ocean management planning area was partitioned into 250 x 250-meter grid cells, each with a unique ID. These data were converted to the planning area grid by extracting all of the cells in which the data layer occurred. The data were then dissolved into one feature.
