Tag Archives: Tidal turbine
Legal fight over Open Hydro continues
Local businesses left holding the bag for millions of dollars worth of work installing a tidal turbine in the Minas Passage want the Irish parent company to keep its hands off its bankrupt subsidiary’s remaining asset.,, The company was the Canadian subsidiary of Irish parent OpenHydro that went bankrupt days after a massive tidal turbine was installed in the Minas Passage. The Irish company’s bankruptcy occured after French defence firm Naval Energies, which had been bankrolling the project to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, pulled its funding. >click to read< 12:37
EDITORIAL: Tidal turbines’ troubled waters
For decades, politicians and provincial boosters have been touting the potential of Nova Scotia’s tidal power. We’re steeped in tide lore around here, from the Shubenacadie River’s tidal bore to those time-lapse videos of dockside fishing boats being floated off the bottom by the incoming tide. There’s enormous power in the Bay of Fundy, if only some clever engineer could channel it somehow into our energy grid. It’s clean, it’s renewable and it’s free. Well, it’s proving more complicated, expensive and difficult to harness that energy than even the most skeptical observer could have imagined. And an accident involving a fishing boat is just more bad news for efforts to use the tides to wean ourselves from coal-burning electricity generation. >click to read<13:15
Undersea Power Cables – Electromagnetic fields have complex and possibly harmful effects on the valuable brown crab.
Over the past 10 years, Scotland has installed thousands of offshore wind turbines in the North Sea and is starting to deploy marine energy devices that generate power from tides and waves. It’s a green energy push that is slowly being replicated in coastal areas the world over. Though these installations are reducing coastal threats such as oil spills, they have the potential to cause other, more subtle, problems for marine life. From each offshore wind and tidal turbine, power cables snake to shore, connecting to power banks, converters, and the wider electrical grid. But these electrified cables could have odd and unexpected effects on seafloor life. >click to read<08:43
“That turbine was put down there in bad faith.” – Cape Sharp Tidal owner files for bankruptcy in Ireland
A week after a massive tidal turbine was placed in the Minas Passage, its owners have filed for bankruptcy. Local contractors, marine service companies, motels, fishermen and other business people are owed an undetermined amount of money. OpenHydro owns 97 per cent of Cape Sharp Tidal, with the remaining three percent owned by Emera, Nova Scotia Power’s parent company.,, Fishermen claim they were told the turbine would not be installed at the Force site in the Minas Passage until the close of the lobster season at the end of July. “They used all these local resources, hired all these local business people, drove right over all that local lobster gear and they never intended to pay nobody,” said Darren Porter, spokesman for the Fundy United Federation, a fishermen’s organization. One contractor, who didn’t want his named used, estimated that OneHydro owes “tens of millions of dollars” to local companies. >click to read<22:11
Cape Sharp Tidal turbine removed from water – Fishermen, “For us, it’s a total vindication,,,”
The Cape Sharp Tidal turbine has been removed from the Minas Passage, but plans to conduct testing at another location farther down the Nova Scotia coast have been cancelled. The company had planned to move the turbine in April from near Parrsboro to St. Marys Bay to do some short-term hydrodynamic testing. But a mooring line became entangled in it, so the move was postponed. Cape Sharp spokesperson Stacey Pineau said the company now has no plans to resume the testing in St. Marys Bay. The proposed testing had drawn opposition from some fishermen, who said no environmental assessment had been carried out for that work. Colin Sproul, of the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association, said the removal of the turbine is “a positive development” because the company has not been able to monitor the equipment since the turbine was disconnected from the transmission cable two months ago. click here to read the story 18:52
Proposal to move Bay of Fundy tidal turbine raises fishermen’s concerns
A fishermen’s group in the Bay of Fundy is worried about Cape Sharp Tidal Venture’s plan to temporarily move its tidal turbine from a designated testing area to a site where an environmental assessment has not been carried out. The Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association said the move endangers fish and violates the rules governing the development of tidal energy in the area. The Cape Sharp Tidal Venture turbine is a joint project between Emera Inc. and OpenHydro. The turbine is currently in the Minas Passage near Parrsboro, N.S. Cape Sharp Tidal confirms that work is currently underway to remove the turbine. It wants to bring it to another area in the Bay of Fundy to do operational tests that would run about five days. “They have no approval to conduct that testing and more importantly is there will be no environmental-monitoring equipment at the site,” said Colin Sproul, spokesperson for the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association. click here to read the story 20:15
Fishermen skeptical of third environmental monitoring device in the Minas Passage
A third environmental monitoring platform is being tested in the Minas Passage by the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy, or FORCE, but a fishermen’s group maintains the sophisticated equipment being deployed still cannot determine mortality, the ultimate environmental test on marine life in the Bay of Fundy. FAST-3 is a third monitoring platform featuring additional sensors to collect data on fish presence and behaviour that was deployed on Feb 2. Several marine industrial companies around the province contributed to its construction and deployment. The platform isn’t on the actual turbine site but in a 10-metre shallower area adjacent to the Crown-lease area that the Province of Nova Scotia has designated for testing up to five different turbine technologies in the near future. Dr. Haley Viehman, a post-doctoral fellow at Acadia University, will be analyzing the data upon its retrieval within a month. Viehman comes to the province from the University of Maine, where she studied fish interactions for five years using hydro-acoustics to observe fish movements prior, during and after a tidal turbine was deployed in 2012 for a year as a test in Cobscook Bay, Maine. Continue reading the story here 12:31
Bay of Fundy Fishermen trying to overturn approval of tidal turbine
A fishermen’s group has asked the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to set aside provincial approval of a massive tidal turbine in the Bay of Fundy, saying the decision was based on poor scientific data. The 1,000-tonne underwater generator was installed on the floor of the Minas Passage in November, but the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association has said the test project should be put on hold to ensure the bay’s productive ecosystem is not harmed. David Coles, the lawyer representing the 175-member association, told the court Wednesday that Environment Minister Margaret Miller overstepped her authority last June because the company behind the project — Cape Sharp Tidal — did not submit enough scientific data about the state of the bay prior to installation. “The minister was required to consider certain things, and they’re just not in the record,” Coles told Justice Heather Robertson. Read the story here 14:07
Tidal turbine in Bay of Fundy generating the most expensive electricity ever produced in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia hailed North America’s first successful grid-connected tidal turbine Tuesday with a ceremonial flipping of a switch at a substation outside Parrsboro. The electricity being generated is some of the most expensive ever produced in Nova Scotia, costing $530 per megawatt hour versus the current average of $60 per megawatt hour. Not everyone is pleased. Protestors stationed outside the event were a reminder that not everyone is convinced. Some fishermen in the Bay of Fundy have gone to court to try and reverse the provincial permit that allowed the deployment. They say it poses a threat to the lobster fishery, a claim the province and Cape Sharp Tidal dismiss. Read the rest here 16:14
