Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here. I hope I can help with your deliberations and your effort to effect policy in the renewable energy world. Ten minutes goes by quite quickly, so I'll get right at it.
Maritime Tidal Energy Corporation was founded and incorporated in Halifax in 2006. We like to think of ourselves as folks who are facilitating, advocating, and being the catalyst for the development of commercial tidal energy in Nova Scotia waters. We also like to think of ourselves as people who are interested in developing a tidal energy or ocean energy industry around those very impressive tidal energy waters.
Most of you know that in Nova Scotia we have a tidal plant at the moment. It's based on barrage technology. That basically means that water is captured behind a dam. When the tide comes in, when the tide goes out, it's let out through a turbine, and it generates about 20 megawatts of tidal power. In the 1980s there were plans to expand that to much larger estuaries, but investors didn't come to the table because the capital costs were extremely high--in the billions--and the environmental damage was seen to be a huge problem.
Recently there has been bubbling into the marketplace a new technology, if you like. They are tidal turbines, which look very much like wind turbines except they operate underwater. You can install them one at a time or in farms, underwater, just like you do on land with wind turbines.
There are a lot of advantages, of course. Because of the modularity, the big capital cost experienced with barrage doesn't happen. The experiments and demos that have been put in place to date have shown that environmentally they're pretty sound. They're basically invisible, because they're underwater and below where transportation on the seas operates. They don't make a lot of noise above water, at least, and they don't produce any carbon dioxide. They're sustainable. As long as the moon is going around the earth and the earth is going around the sun, we're going to have flow in the tidal regions.
All of that has the effect, long term, of leveling energy costs and improving the security of supply, because we can provide it to ourselves locally as opposed to Nova Scotia having to import non-renewables.
With all those advantages, what the heck is the world doing about tidal energy these days? Well, I can't talk about it all, but I'll highlight two things that are happening that I think are extremely important.
One is in the U.K. They've installed three test turbines, and there's one to be installed this coming year. Second, in Canada we've installed two test turbines, one in Race Rocks and one in the Bay of Fundy. We plan to install two more in the Bay of Fundy in 2012.
The U.K. has really become excited about what they've learned from these demonstration units. They're surrounded by water, like Nova Scotia. Their security of supply is somewhat problematic, like Nova Scotia's. They've looked at the potential and said, look, we can, in the next 10 years, produce one gigawatt of tidal energy. That's about 1,000 turbines they're going to install. Only one is producing energy to the grid right now in the U.K.
Scotland has really gotten behind this thing. They're very excited. They've said, look, we'll lease some undersea land or property to tidal developers in exchange for their generating some 600 megawatts of power in the next 10 years. So they're moving.
In Canada, we have a really big lead, relative to any other country in the world, except perhaps the U.K., with our demonstration projects, but we have no commercial activity at the moment. Given that lead, there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to think we can install about 600 megawatts of tidal energy power over the next ten years.
We think that tidal energy will be very competitive with wind. Clearly, we have to come down. With multiple productions, the curve will drop. As our learning curve improves, the price will come down.
The reason we think it will be in the neighbourhood of wind is that there is much less steel required in a tidal turbine to produce the same amount of power as a wind turbine produces. Because steel is one of the major costs in these turbines, we think we can get there. I'm not the only one saying that. A lot of people who have done pretty significant analyses are also saying that.
What do we need to do to get into the ocean energy business in Canada? We need to understand the opportunities that are open to us on both coasts--and on the north coast, for that matter. We need to define our targets to capitalize on those opportunities. Together, with government, we need to support with actions and confidence the ocean energy industry and marine industry in general. We need to understand the rules, and they have to be clear. The permissions process has to be easy. That's no small task, given our multiple levels of government and the multiple departmental approvals that have to be obtained in order to set things on the bottom of the ocean.
Finally, we need to put sufficient incentives in place so that the early investors can make a reasonable profit. The early investors will allow us to continue to build on the leadership we have displayed with the demonstration units. We, together with Scotland, could, if we tried and wanted to, be to ocean energy what Denmark and Germany have been to wind and solar.
Thank you.