Tidal power gets boost
Research needed into environmental impact of tidal energy: executive director
As Nova Scotia pushes ahead with its bid to become a world leader in tidal energy, significant knowledge gaps remain — particularly when it comes to environmental monitoring of test turbines in the Bay of Fundy, the head of an independent research group says.
“We don’t know enough about the environmental impacts of those devices,” Stephen Dempsey, executive director of the Offshore Energy Research Association, told a news conference Tuesday at Dalhousie University.
“Will they harm our marine life? What will it do to ... our intertidal bays? This work has to proceed. We have to deepen our understanding to make progress.”
Dempsey, whose non-profit organization dispenses funding from the Nova Scotia Energy Department, made the comments after the province announced a new competition for research funding.
In all, $150,000 is being offered to support five projects that will involve the use of Dalhousie’s Aquatron — one of Canada’s largest aquatic research facilities.
Dempsey, standing in front of one of the Aquatron’s huge water-filled tanks, said the top research priorities include developing specialized technology to deal with the extreme conditions within the bay, where the amount of water flow as the tide changes amounts to a larger volume than that produced by all of the rivers in the world.
In the Minas Passage, a fivekilometre-wide channel near Parrsboro, two tidal turbines have undergone testing in recent years. In 2009, the first in-stream prototype — weighing in at 400 tonnes — was torn apart by the world’s highest tides, which can move at 18 kilometres per hour.
As well, Dempsey said more research is needed to reduce the cost of producing electricity from tidal energy.
“Costs are too high to be economically viable,” he said. “If we solve all of the technical problems and we don’t deal with the cost issue, we’ll have an elegant solution that is not implementable.”
But the first priority Dempsey mentioned was the need to improve environmental monitoring.