Bankrupt tidal energy company Sustainable Marine’s massive barge broke loose from its moorings, crashed onto the rocks near a seaside village of Westport on Brier Island, N.S. in the Bay of Fundy, before two fishermen finally captured it in a dramatic rescue.Supplied
It was just around sunrise when people awoke in the fishing village of Westport, N.S., and noticed with alarm that something was missing from the harbour. A massive tidal turbine platform, formerly owned by UK-based Sustainable Marine Energy, had been moored and idle since the company went voluntarily bankrupt last spring – and now it was gone.
It didn’t take long before fishermen and villagers tracked down the 30-by-24-metre barge, grounded on the rocks about a kilometre away from the harbour, with one end of the hull tipped over the jagged, rocky shore.
Village people standing on the shoreline were shocked and angry as they watched two local fishing captains rescue the platform, pulling it in with lines at high tide last Friday, said Jess Tudor, a local fisherman and artisanal sea salt maker. He filmed the recovery while walking his dog.
Mr. Tudor’s wife, Amy Tudor, a teacher and whale watching tour guide, said it was a relief that the forceful tide was going in the opposite direction of the village when the platform came loose from its mooring. Otherwise, it would’ve headed straight for salmon aquaculture cages, wharves, mooring buoys, boats and wooden lobster cars – underwater storage facilities – all of which were in the water in preparation for the local lobster fishing season, set to start Monday.
“We’re all very lucky,” she said. “Those structures wouldn’t stand a chance against that platform.”
The incident was the latest in a saga of setbacks in the years-long technological race to harness tidal stream energy in the Bay of Fundy, where roughly 160 billion tonnes of water flows with each tide, equal to four times the estimated flow of all the freshwater rivers in the world combined.
Besides the danger the unmoored barge posed, the mishap also raises questions about the abandoned project – which received $28.5-million in federal funding and is now being managed by Deloitte Restructuring – and the future of Canada’s role in harnessing tidal energy after Sustainable Marine pulled the plug last spring, citing too many regulatory hurdles from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
A federal task force, struck last spring, is now finalizing its report, which includes recommendations on how to streamline regulatory decisions for tidal energy projects in the Bay of Fundy – a largely untapped potential source of clean and reliable energy that would support the country’s transition to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
Meanwhile, the barge has been refloated and secured in Westport’s harbour, said DFO spokeswoman Christine Lyons. She said the Canadian Coast Guard has established incident command of the situation and are working to ensure a reasonable and appropriate response by the owner to prevent pollution damage.
“The trustee for the barge and their contractors are taking all reasonable measures required to prevent pollution damage, including removal of the barge from the marine environment,” wrote Ms. Lyons.
Deloitte Restructuring, the trustee for the barge, did not respond to The Globe and Mail’s requests for comment.
Ms. Lyons said contractors have inspected the barge and completed repairs, adding that contaminants have been removed and no pollution was observed in or around the barge. The mooring equipment has also been fixed, she said.
After Sustainable Marine announced it was ending operations in Canada because they couldn’t see a clear federal regulatory pathway to deliver their project, the federal government announced a task force with officials from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Natural Resources Canada, the Nova Scotia government and the tidal energy industry, including Marine Renewables Canada and the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy.
The task force’s final report is scheduled to be released early in the new year, with recommendations on the process of advancing tidal energy projects, said Ms. Lyons.
So far, attempts to harness energy from what’s touted as the highest tides in the world – rising and falling the equivalent of a four-storey building – have all been a bust.
In 2009, an Irish company, partnering with Nova Scotia Power, installed the world’s first tidal turbine on the floor of the Minas Passage, only to see the test project blasted into many pieces by strong currents.
Its 1,300-tonne turbine is still stranded on the bottom of the Minas Passage, the narrowest part of the bay. BigMoon Power, one of three tidal developers still vying to harness tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy, purchased the giant turbine and has until the end of 2024 to retrieve it.
For local fishermen – many of whom support the development of tidal energy – the recovery of the rogue tidal turbine platform isn’t the end of the story. It’s no longer an open hazard and has been properly secured again, but the incident drives home the perilousness of leaving behind equipment in an area with the strongest tides in the world and intense hurricanes, said Mr. Tudor.
“People are happy that it’s not crashed up any more, but it is still in the middle of our harbour,” he said. “And you never know – in November we start to get some weather. When it comes to this time in the season the Bay of Fundy gets quite mean.”