Turbines in Fundy Harmless?

I was astonished to read the following headline in the Chronicle Herald on November 9th, 2011 “Tidal project doing no harm “. The headline referred to a report released in early November by the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), an industry and government funded group researching, and seemingly promoting, the development of tidal energy in the Bay of Fundy. According to the Herald article, this first annual monitoring report concludes that the demonstration project “hasn’t had any negative impacts so far on the environment in the Bay of Fundy”. It goes on to add that, “the turbine was successfully deployed and recovered without environmental consequences”. The reason for my utter astonishment is that this conclusion is based solely on the results from a single turbine that lost all communications immediately upon deployment and catastrophically failed (the turbine blades broke) soon after. Hardly a credible experiment for proclaiming no environmental effects of tidal power! Is this conclusion indicative of the calibre of the environmental research that we can expect from FORCE in the future? Should Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers be concerned about the quality of the science that will be used to assess tidal power effects on the Fundy environment and ultimately to determine if  there will be a massive proliferation of turbines throughout the Bay?

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The widespread loud trumpeting of such a questionable “conclusion” based on such flimsy evidence also raises important questions about FORCE’s impartiality as a research organization charged with assessing environmental effects. This report, press release and subsequent newspaper article appears to be a not so subtle effort at spin doctoring the failed first deployment. Is this indicative of the PR campaign that will be waged by FORCE to artfully lull the public as to potential adverse environmental consequences of tidal power? Should such an organization with such a clear conflict-of-interest be responsible for managing and conducting the “independent monitoring” called for by the federal fisheries and provincial environment departments?

Interestingly, the monitoring report makes no mention of factors that might have caused the turbine blades to fail so quickly. On June 11, 2010 CBC radio quoted Mark Savory, the vice-president of technical and construction services for Nova Scotia Power, as stating that “the damage to the turbine was likely not connected to the death of a whale found on a nearby beach earlier in the week”. The CBC report continued that “when asked if sea ice could have played a role in breaking the blades, Savory said it was too early to speculate. ‘We don't know until we do the detailed engineering’". The FORCE report is silent on both these questions.

On a closely related point, the Herald article of November 9th also notes that a “a federal environmental assessment is now getting underway for a small-scale tidal project in Digby County” that “aims to start generating electricity next year”. The company involved, Fundy Tidal Inc., is also planning on “placing in-stream turbines at various locations within the outer Bay of Fundy, including Grand Passage, Petit Passage, Digby Gut and southwest of Brier Island”. According to FORCE’s website, the main rationale for establishing the tidal power test facility near Parrsboro is “to study the potential for tidal turbines to operate within the Bay of Fundy environment”, before going ahead with more widespread tidal power development throughout the Bay. This was also the repeated mantra from the provincial government in the lead up to the opening of the test facility in Minas Passage and it was accompanied by the promise of a gradual, cautious approach to tidal energy development in the Bay. It appears now that the province is instead jumping bodily onto the industrial bandwagon and encouraging companies to do an end run around the process for assessing whether in-stream tidal energy is as environmentally friendly as the proponents want us to believe. At this rate the Bay of Fundy will be full of turbines by the time FORCE eventually determines if in-stream tidal energy is a good fit for Fundy.