Installing Clean Currrent’s tidal in-stream
generator at Race Rocks, off Vancouver Island.
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EnCana enables tidal tests
EnCana Corp., developer of the Deep Panuke deep sea natural gas
field 250 kilometres southeast of Halifax, has promised a $3-million,
zero-interest, flexible-repayment loan from its environmental innovation fund to help build Nova Scotia’s tidal power test facility.
“At EnCana, we believe in unlocking the value of unconventional
energy,” says Gerry Protti, president of EnCana’s offshore and international division. “Whether it is production of natural gas from tight
sands, shales, coal seams, or the production of oil from the oilsands,
unconventional thinking is at the core of what we do every day at our
operating sites across North America.”
EnCana has already been dabbling in tidal power on the west
coast, where it invested $3 million to help Victoria’s international
Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific and tidal power company
Clean Current Power Systems Inc. of Vancouver establish a demonstration project to capture the emissions-free renewable energy of
the tidal currents that rush over Race Rocks at up to seven knots.
The Race Rocks group of islands form the eastern entrance to the
Strait of Juan de Fuca, three nautical miles from Pearson College and
10 nautical miles southwest of Victoria. Pearson staff and students
act as stewards of the sensitive ecological reserve. Using tidal power
allows them to turn off their two diesel generators.
“We recognize that this [energy] business has impacts,” EnCana
spokeswoman Lori MacLean recently told Oilweek. EnCana’s environmental innovation fund “is about trying to [ease] the impacts
associated with technology or improve the environmental performance of using energy. It invests in technology—ideas—to improve
the use of energy.”
A fellow backer in both projects is Sustainable Development
Technology Canada (SDTC), a foundation created by the federal government and operated at arm’s length to help advance cleaner technologies by filling funding gaps between research and commercialization.
“EnCana and SDTC are the only ones who will fund high-risk ventures in Canada,” says Clean Current chief executive officer Glen Darou.
