Minas Passage turbine environmentally compliant, but broken

Crews from Ireland who came to check on the ill-fated Minas Passage turbine are investigating why now the rotor won't turn.

The five-storey-tall Cape Sharp turbine has been sitting in darkness after its parent company OpenHydro Group Ltd. filed for liquidation. 

But when they started the monitoring systems back up to make sure the turbine is compliant with environmental standards, the team from Ireland learned that the turbine's rotor is not turning, said Stacey Pineau, spokesperson for Emera, a 20 per cent partner in the project.

"They believe an internal component failure in the generator caused sufficient damage to prevent the rotor from turning," Pineau said in an email exchange.

OpenHydro filed for liquidation in Ireland after its parent company, Naval Energies, said it will stop funding tidal power projects.

Tony Wright, general manager of Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), said the liquidation notice was "very quick and very unexpected."

The turbine was shut down on July 26,  just a two days after it was connected to the grid and turned on.

"So quite suddenly the turbine was then physically disconnected from the transmission grid, was made safe, and with that the monitoring systems were shut down," Wright said.

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Pineau said the turbine was working just fine when it was deployed in July.

"It is too early to understand when the component failure happened. The team will analyze the information collected from sensors on the turbine and will report whether the turbine could be functional," she said. "In the meantime, the turbine rotor will remain stationary with the environmental sensors operating."

Turbine was not compliant

Weekly turbine monitoring is required by environmental assessment, specifically under the Fisheries Act. But since the liquidation began, that has not been done for the Cape Sharp turbine.

"It fell out of compliance with the [Department of Fisheries and Oceans] authorization," Wright said.

Wright said FORCE is a not-for-profit organization that makes sure all tidal energy projects have a place to operate in the Minas Passage and are compliant to regulatory rules.

Wright said FORCE is responsible for "project-level monitoring," which means overall environmental monitoring such as fish surveys, acoustic monitoring for marine mammals, seabird surveys, shoreline surveys and upcoming lobster and sound monitoring.

But each developer is responsible for operating their own monitoring systems on each turbine, to a 100-metre radius. This monitoring is supposed to measure avoidance and evasion of marine species around the turbine.

"Because of the liquidation process that was suspended," Wright said.

That means in the 100-metre area around the turbine, no listening devices were trying to pinpoint the location of sounds and no acoustic imaging camera was trying to detect the presence of marine life in the vicinity of the turbine.

Wright also said FORCE was commissioned by Cape Sharp to do some turbine monitoring including fish surveys above and around the turbine, but that still did not make it compliant to regulations.

"They did make an attempt to do what they could," he said.

Pineau said as of Monday, all environmental monitoring devices required for regulatory compliance are working and transferring data to shore.

"Verification of the data is underway," she said.

Emera announced it was pulling out of the project in August.

What changed

Wright said Cape Sharp decided to rehire on their own a series of former OpenHydro employees to control the monitoring systems back on board.

But he could not say if they were waiting on liquidator approval, or what changed for them to be able to rehire some crew members.

He said they've already seen some of the results of monitoring data and "the analysis part will start happening very shortly."