Last week I spent a few days in Halifax, Nova Scotia as a guest of Nova Scotia Power, which covered the cost of my trip. There I spoke with several N.S. Power executives, N.S. Premier Darrell Dexter, and toured a number of electricity generation sites — gas, tidal, wind. I had heard the province was getting serious about renewables and energy conservation, but I was pleasantly surprised at how serious. My Clean Break column today is about the transition Nova Scotia is making to renewable energy. It’s only the jurisdiction in North America with a hard cap on carbon emissions and by law it has to have 25 per cent of its electricity system supplied by renewables. By 2020, its goal is to up that to 40 per cent through aggressive conservation efforts, development of at least one import-export transmission link (to New Brunswick or Labrador) and an embrace of tidal power. Considering this is a province that gets more than three-quarters of its electricity from fossil fuels — mostly coal — this is a big leap.

Nova Scotia is out to prove that tidal power can be competitive with other sources. It has the only tidal power facility in North America and one of just three in the world — the Annapolis Tidal Power Plant, which I visited and found fascinating. It’s an old barrage-style facility constructed in the early 1980 and only capable of generating about 20 megawatts. Newer technologies planned for the Bay of Fundy, however, include turbines developed by Ireland-based OpenHydro, which is testing one of its machines near the Annapolis site. N.S. Power sees it quite realist to develop about 300 MW of tidal power in Nova Scotia between now and 2020, or roughly 10 per cent of the province’s capacity. Not bad. Some studies suggest there’s as much as 2,000 MW of development potential there.

In a country where the federal government considers green energy policy and investment a nuisance, it’s refreshing to see yet another province kick its green plans into high gear.

So calm is the solar farm as its grid of thousands of panels bask gloriously in the sun. Quiet. Serene. You can almost smell the Tropicana suntan lotion. Wind turbines have it a little harder with unpredictable gusts and changing wind direction putting immense stress on blades, gears and other compenents. But of all these renewable sources, those that must rest in the ocean have it the toughest. Storms. Pounding waves. Salt. And who knows what else?

It’s why it comes as no surprise when attempts to capture the energy of our oceans don’t go as planned. The latest news comes out of Nova Scotia, where the province’s power company and partner OpenHydro Tidal Technology are trying to capture tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy. OpenHydro recently placed a 400-tonne, six-storey turbine in the Bay of Fundy, home of some of the most awesome and powerful tides in the world. Earlier this month, the two companies discovered that the harsh ocean environment had broken two of the turbine’s blades. The massive 1-megawatt machine is now scheduled to be removed sometime this fall. We’ve seen this story before with demonstration projects from Verdant, Pelamis Wave, Finavera and others. It’s not the technology doesn’t work, it’s that we haven’t been able to prove the technology can last for 20 or more years in service. The ocean is unforgiveable, as builders of offshore oil platforms and offshore wind projects known. That said, this is exactly why these demonstrations and pilot projects are so important. Unless we can test the many news wave, tidal and riverbed designs entering the market, we’ll never learn how to improve their designs. Computer modelling and simulations can’t replace real-world testing.

Nova Scotia Power has partnered up with Dublin, Ireland-based OpenHydro Group to install a 1-megawatt tidal turbine to the seabed in the Bay of Fundy. It’s OpenHydro’s first installation of its 1-MW machine and is expected to be fully operational later this fall. Over two years the two companies will collect operational data, including impacts on environment, robustness of equipment, and power generation. The sub-sea base was manufactured by a local company in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

The OpenHydro turbine is one of three being tested under a Nova Scotia government pilot program, which aims to tap the immense tidal-energy potential in the Bay of Fundy. The Electric Power Research Institute has identified the Bay as one of the best — if not the best — sites in North America to develop tidal-energy projects. In fact, it’s capable of realistically generating 300 megawatts of tital power. U.K.-based Marine Current and B.C.-based Clean Current are the other two turbine concepts slated for testing.

I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of trying to co-locate offshore wind turbines with wave-energy technology as a way of saving on transmission-line costs and creating a capacity factor that’s much higher than the two technologies on their own. Back in July I e-mailed Francis Farley, inventor of the Anaconda wave power converter — basically a snake-like machine that captures the kinetic energy in the waves as its various segments bob up and down. I asked Farley what he thought about the idea of pairing his system with offshore wind. “You have a good point,” he said. “There would be some economies in combining offshore wind with wave energy, and some sites would have both.”

I dropped the idea, thinking it might be good fodder for a column at a later date. Then I noticed this week that Eric Stoutenburg, a researcher at Stanford University, came to a similar conclusion in a research paper that he presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. “If wave energy wants to get off the ground, it might have better potential to develop in the shadow of an offshore wind plant,” Stoutenburg told Cleantech Group. (more…)

Finavera Renewables, a Vancouver-based wind and wave power developer, has enough troubles these days. The publicly traded company has shares trading at 5 cents and as an untested newcomer to the developer scene it’s considered much riskier than more established rivals when it comes to raising money, whether that be equity or debt. Not good when you’re staring in the face of the worst credit-crunch and financial-sector meltdown in at least a generation.

Nothing a prescription of Ativan can’t deal with, right? But then the California Public Utilities Commission comes along and nixes a wave-energy power purchase agreement between Finavera and Pacific Gas & Electric, which agreed to buy electricity from the Canadian company’s 2-megawatt wave project — the first commercial wave contract in the country, experts say. It was to use Finavera’s AquaBUOY technology, devices that turn the kinetic energy of vertical wave motion into emission-free electricity.

Greentech Media has the messy details here. The bottom line is that the commission declared the power-purchase price too high and the technology too unproven to proceed. Finavera has since put on a brave face, saying it will focus its efforts on projects under development in Canada and Ireland. But as nobel or attractive or economic any of those projects could be, the sad reality is that in this market at this time there’s not much wiggle room for setbacks.

NOTE: Speaking of Darwinism, the credit crunch and those least fit to survive, read this post from the Globe and Mail’s Andrew Willis about the struggles wind developer EarthFirst Canada is having because of difficulty finding financing. The death watch is on.