This 1000-Ton Turbine Will Harvest Tidal Energy to Power 500 Homes in Canada The Bay of Fundy, on Canada’s East Coast, has famously strong tides. An incoming tide can pull 160 billion tonnes of seawater into the bay, with a vertical range of over 16 metres, and swift tidal currents. It has the highest recorded tides in the world. For a long time, green energy advocates have wanted to harness that powerful tide to produce energy, and now it’s happening. On Monday, a massive, five-storey-tall turbine was installed on the seafloor, and over the next few days, workers are hooking it up to the power grid via a subsea cable. It will be the first tidal array in North America connected to an electrical grid like this, and will eventually be able to power 500 houses. “We know from other turbine installations around the world that fish and marine mammals are not colliding with turbines,” Sarah Dawson, a spokesperson for Cape Sharp Tidal, which was selected by the Nova Scotia Department of Energy to install the test turbines, told me. “With ten years of similar devices we’ve installed in Scotland, there hasn’t been a single incident where any marine mammal, dolphin or whale, has collided,” she said. (Scotland has invested heavily in tidal energy, and recently launched the world’s first large-scale tidal energy farm.) See http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bay-of-fundy-tidal-energy-cape-sharp-tidal-turbine#-/
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