Long recognised by eastern Canada’s indigenous peoples and early European pioneers for their incredible power, the Bay of Fundy tides — where some 115 billion tonnes of water surge in and out every 12.5 hours — at last have an industrial-scale in-stream tidal-energy turbine installed in their 10-knot flow.
That honour fell to Open-Hydro. Last November, the Irish company partnered with Nova Scotia Power (NSP) to deploy a one-megawatt (MW) device in the stretch of water known as the Minas Passage, the first of three machines that will be trialled at the province’s soon-to-be built Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), located some 100km northwest of Halifax.
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