Capturing the energy of the famous waters off Canada’s East Coast could light up all of Nova Scotia and beyond, but every effort to tap it — and there have been many — has met an unhappy end
What Jason Hayman remembers most is feeling “numb.” He had met with his board and lawyers multiple times, and on a spring morning in 2023 he was off to meet Virginia Forsyth, a notary public in Cowes, United Kingdom, and someone he had known for years.
Forsyth’s office in Trent House, Isle of Wight, a stately stone residence with a stately stone wall out front, was just a few blocks from the local marina where Hayman moored his sailboat. He walked to the meeting since he wasn’t in a hurry. He wasn’t, mentally, entirely present at all, knowing the appointment was but a formality and that its purpose involved signing what amounted to a death certificate for his tidal power technology company, Sustainable Marine Energy Ltd. (SME).
“It was a rough day,” he recalled. “We had bet the farm on Canada, and I was walking in to see someone I had known for quite a while and saying, ‘I need you to notarize some papers, because I am hanging up my spurs.’”
The now-former CEO of the now-bankrupt SME was not the first entrepreneur to have a rough day related to the Bay of Fundy. Every effort to tap the world’s highest tides has met an unhappy end, the causes for which have been many. Some tidal power players simply lacked legitimacy at the outset. Many more ran out of money as the bills piled up and investors’ patience dried up, but the string of defeats has not killed the dream since plans are already in the works for another company to give it a try.
SME came tantalizingly, encouragingly close, and succeeded in proving its tide harnessing technology, only to be undone by an opaque regulatory environment — granted, one that has since been revised and clarified somewhat — and the alleged nearsightedness of bureaucrats at Fisheries and Oceans Canada anxious to see definitive scientific proof that tidal turbines will not negatively impact fish species when, globally and locally, not a single scientific study to date has shown it will.
The optimistic side of me, that hopes these things get done, looks at Fundy and sees harnessing it is a ‘when’
Jason Hayman, CEO, Sustainable Marine Energy Ltd.
That water, in places, moves at speeds of five metres per second, or roughly 20 km/h, which is almost double the tidal speed in the Orkney Islands off Scotland’s northern coast. Tidal energy is actively being harnessed there on a small scale, but a U.K. government-financed plan is in place to ramp up production by 2026.
“The optimistic side of me, that hopes these things get done, looks at Fundy and sees harnessing it is a ‘when,’” Hayman said.
May the force be with you
If the “when” indeed comes to pass, Act One in the recounting of events would be set at the end of a dirt road near Parrsboro, N.S., where you will find Sandra Currie, the facility manager at the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), on a pleasantly warm fall afternoon. She is arguably bang on with her assertion that she has the “best office view in the world,” peering out, as she does, through a large bank of windows at the Minas Passage.
Tourists trickle into the centre during the warmer months, some of whom harbour a keen interest in tidal energy, while other folks simply come to drink in the view.
“There is no admission charge here,” Currie said. “Everyone is welcome to come on in, have a chat and we’ll show them around. The most common question we get about tidal energy is, ‘Will it ever happen?’”
Tory Rushton, Nova Scotia’s minister of natural resources and renewables, who just so happens to be an electrician by trade, described tidal power as a potential “game changer for Nova Scotia, Canada and the world.” Ottawa has likewise ponied up funds for FORCE while providing tidal stream technology developers, such as SME, tens of millions of dollars in grants.
The research centre is outfitted with four offshore subsea power cables that connect to the Nova Scotia power grid. A company that clears all the regulatory hurdles can plug right in, assess whether its turbine is up to the Fundy test, refine the device and, in theory, keep the environmental watchdogs at bay by monitoring for potential impacts and collaborating with local university researchers.
Assuming the turbine works, the fish and bureaucrats are happy, and one turbine can be scaled up to two and even more, a successful tidal technology developer can look forward to being paid a “feed-in” tariff by the province for the electricity it produces. For example, SME’s agreement with Nova Scotia would have paid it 53 cents per kilowatt hour, when the current off-peak rate for consumers is 11 cents.
“Developing tidal is expensive, so for someone who looks at the Bay of Fundy and says, ‘I’ll give it a go. I’ll give it a try. I’ll put my money where my mouth is,’ the feed-in tariff gives them a way to recoup on their investment and that’s critical,” Sue Molloy, a tidal energy expert and former executive at German-owned Black Rock Tidal Power Inc., said. (The Germans eventually merged Black Rock and U.K.-based SME into a single company.)
Molloy is Irish, moved to Canada as a teenager and wound up landlocked in southern Ontario, where she wondered where someone eager to study naval architecture at university — that is, ship design — could get a degree in it. Her interest in ships led her to Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L., in the early 2000s, a move that coincided with an emerging focus by Scottish university engineering departments on harnessing the tides.
The most common question we get about tidal energy is, ‘Will it ever happen?’
Sandra Currie, manager, Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy
Molloy looked at what the Scots were up to and was hooked, since naval propulsion systems work on similar principles to tidal turbines. Within a few years, she was teaching courses on tidal power at Dalhousie University in Halifax and conducting research at FORCE, which is where Schottel GmbH, a German ship propulsion manufacturing giant that began dabbling in tidal, found her in 2016 and hired her to be its boots on the ground in Nova Scotia.
“Engineers are optimists by nature,” Molloy said.
But what drove her around the bend in Fundy was the federal fish people at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. A significant part of the engineering challenge presented by the tides involves coming up with environmental monitoring systems that can assess the potential impact of turbines on fish populations.
The tidal stream is a blur of sand and pebbles — imagine an underwater hurricane — and it is also loud. A turbine blade, outfitted with sophisticated underwater cameras and microphones, is hard-pressed to identify a lobster zooming past.
“What we don’t know is, are fish in the area of the turbine, and when the water is moving fast, do the fish move to the side, or do they go with the flow like they are on a slip-and-slide?” Molloy said. “Everything we have done to date has shown that fish won’t be harmed by turbines, but we also can’t say that is a natural given.”
Race against time
Complicating an already challenging monitoring environment is a race against time. In Fundy’s Minas Passage, a mechanic who needs to tighten a few screws on a tidal turbine has about an hour a day to work on it before the next underwater hurricane kicks up.
Molloy believes no problem is insurmountable, but what proved immovable in her experience as a tidal company executive was the government’s unwillingness to clearly articulate the parameters of environmental monitoring that needed to be done on a project to move ahead.
The lack of regulatory clarity, after tens of millions of dollars spent, invariably spooked investors and would produce yet another Fundy failure, even though the failure did not necessarily have anything to do with shoddy engineering or the like.
“I feel perfectly comfortable saying that the reason we cannot get anywhere with this industry is because nobody has been willing to put a boundary on the environmental limitations,” Molloy said.
I feel perfectly comfortable saying that the reason we cannot get anywhere with this industry is because nobody has been willing to put a boundary on the environmental limitations
Sue Molloy, a tidal energy expert
Hayman was likewise hopping mad at the government after SME folded, as was Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston. A federal Task Force on Sustainable Tidal Energy Development in the Bay of Fundy was struck, and it published a final report in early 2024 that called for establishing a “revised stage approach” for Fisheries Act Authorizations.
A tidal turbine technology developer licensed by the province to deploy a device at FORCE must demonstrate “through monitoring, the nature of tidal device interactions with fish.” If there is no evidence of any negative impacts, the company can deploy additional devices. However, the caveat in the fine print is that for the revised stage approach to be fully effective, “improved monitoring approaches to inform risk assessment” will need to be developed.
In other words, the metaphorical water is not as muddy as it previously was, but there is still work to be done to calculate the risk, or absence thereof, that turbines pose to the marine environment and to gauge how much risk is too much for Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Laurie Currie, who fished the Bay of Fundy for lobster, scallops and herring for 20 years and now operates an outdoor adventure company just a short hop from FORCE, has some thoughts on the subject.
No relation to Sandra at the research centre, he said he is not much for politics. He is a bit of a “weirdo,” he said, given he competes in 100-mile ultramarathons, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and, as a side hustle, forages for edible plants and sells them by the garbage bag full.
Yet, as someone who pulled a living from the sea for a good chunk of his life, he believes all the regulatory hullaballoo over protecting fish from the turbines has been overstated. It is fundamentally misguided, he said, since the real danger to the fish is from the people catching them and the environmental impact of a warming planet, which tidal power could help address by putting an end to Nova Scotia’s coal-burning ways.
“Is a turbine going to impact the local fish habitat? No. The damage a scallop dragger does to the ocean floor is much more devastating,” he said. “Is a fish going to swim into a turbine? Well, these are not dumb creatures. How many birds do you see flying into wind turbines?”
Currie’s point? Let’s get on with it since our grandchildren’s future is at stake. Jane Lowrie is a grandmother and the lead investor behind Eauclaire Tidal Limited Partnership, a privately owned tidal project developer that leases one of the four research berths at FORCE. The other three berths are currently unoccupied, and the ongoing thinking is that the collapse of SME and the fallout thereafter is the reason why. But she is in tidal for the long haul and comes from a family unafraid to take risks.
Her father Don was a corn and hog farmer in Tillsonburg, Ont., but he had other ambitions. He founded Lagasco Inc. in the 1970s and started buying up leases to the oil rights on Ontario properties. Lagasco remains a family-owned company, and today it controls about 85 per cent of the Ontario oil market, shipping its light crude to Pennsylvania for refining.
The family got into renewables about 20 years ago by operating on a similar business model to its oil holdings and buying up the lease rights to wind power on Ontario farmland, and then enjoying a reliable revenue stream once the turbines started spinning.
Eauclaire is a separate entity from Lagasco, but, as with oil and wind, getting involved in tidal energy and paying $1.5 million annually to lease a berth at FORCE involves having a patient eye for future revenues should they connect a device to the Nova Scotia grid and then scale it up to multiple devices.
“It is a long-term project,” Lowrie said.
The coming tide
Eauclaire has partnered with Orbital Marine Power Ltd., a tidal technology company headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, that designed, built and successfully deployed the world’s most powerful tidal turbine to date at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney.
The floating tidal turbine platform resembles a giant, winged, yellow submarine, and it was connected to the grid three years ago. The unit cost about $18 million to build and provides power to about 2,000 U.K. homes, with a projected operational life expectancy of 15 years. Orbital has since secured a government contract to build six additional tidal turbines, each packing more power-producing oomph than the initial version.
“Orbital are not promoters, they have turbines, they have been successful elsewhere and they have a huge knowledge base,” Lowrie said. “I think we are going to get through this challenge in Fundy and find success.”
If Orbital can solve Fundy, Andrew Scott, the company’s CEO, will deserve some of the credit. He is 47 and lives near a prestigious golf course on the Edinburgh outskirts, though he doesn’t golf there. Instead, he runs across it with a wetsuit on and a surfboard tucked beneath one arm when the conditions are right to hit the nearby ocean.
“I’ve only ever owned vans, so I could live in the back and chase waves around obscure corners of Scotland and Europe,” he said.
Scott has surfed in Nova Scotia and, in sizing up the challenge Fundy presents, he is not about to overpromise results. There is a long history in the tidal sector of overpromising, and every broken promise creates a greater break in the faith among the public, politicians and investors that tidal is a bet that is ultimately going to pay off.
But what he will say is that his company has gone a long way toward addressing one of the biggest knocks against tidal power: cost.
The device deployed in Orkney was designed with Fundy in mind. It features turbines that lift out of the water at the press of a button, providing technicians easy access to service them. In the small window of calm between tidal cycles in the Minas Passage, being able to fix stuff without having to dip beneath the waves to do so saves time and money.
“There is a phenomenal resource that sits there at Fundy,” Scott said. “At the end of the day, I do believe, technologically, there are solutions to harness it.”
A regulatory-related back and forth with Fisheries and Oceans Canada is now underway and, should the stars align and the paperwork be properly filed and approved, construction on an Orbital turbine platform in the Bay of Fundy would start in 2027.
Who knows what Jason Hayman will be up to by then, but as September tipped into October, he was in Barcelona for the America’s Cup international sailing competition. The former tidal power developer was a technical adviser to one of the teams, consulting on its successful delivery of a hydrogen-powered high-speed chase boat.
Sailing is a remedy Hayman sought following his meeting with Forsyth in May 2023. About a week after that, he, his partner and a couple of friends untied from the marina in Cowes and set sail for France. Looking back across the Atlantic at the Bay of Fundy now, he feels a range of emotions: pride in what was accomplished, but frustration over an opportunity lost.
Of course, engineers are committed optimists, and he hasn’t given up hope on the future of tidal power in Fundy just yet.
“If policymakers in Canada and Nova Scotia can design a program that clearly demonstrates that, yes, we want tidal energy to happen here, then it is going to happen,” Hayman said. “But it has to be an assertive ‘We want this here’ since anything less isn’t going to get it done.”