Members of the Bay of Fundy Inshore Fisherman’s Association are planning to seek court injunction to suspend the installation of tidal energy devices in the Bay, Canadian media report.
The fisheries group, representing over 150 Bay of Fundy fishermen, have made a decision to launch the court injunction to halt the installation of tidal turbines in the Bay stating environmental concerns about the impact of the turbines on the fish and Bay of Fundy’s ecosystem as the main reason, according to LocalXpress, Canadian online news provider.
The installation of the first tidal turbine is expected to begin at the end of next month, with the deployment of the first 2 MW OpenHydro turbine by Cape Sharp Tidal, which will be followed by another one of the same type later this year.
“If our province and scientists won’t save the Bay, then we will. We’re not going to stand by and watch this be destroyed. We – Nova Scotians and Canadians – will be the ones to lose everything and the fishermen will be the ones who will be blamed for the collapse of the fishery. Fishermen were emptying their pockets to donate and writing cheques for large sums of their personal money to put a stop to this,” Darren Porter , a local weir fisherman was quoted as saying by The Chronicle Herald.
The injunction will be sought against the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy (FORCE), also involving Cape Sharp Tidal, the joint venture between Emera and OpenHydro, as well as Nova Scotia province, LocalXpress reports.
The move follows the release of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada review of the Environmental Effects Monitoring Program (EEMP) for the Fundy tidal energy project.
The report concluded that the data gaps in the FORCE baseline report (2011-2013), and the impact of these gaps on the ability to monitor and measure potential changes resulting from the installation of tidal in-stream energy conversion (TISEC) devices, are not adequately reconciled in FORCE’s proposed EEMP (2015-2020) stating that it does not sufficiently address the risk of interaction between fish and marine mammals with TISEC devices and is unlikely to result in the detection of both mid- and far-field effects of TISEC devices on fish and marine mammals.
The report also analyzed the TISEC-specific EEMP for the Cape Sharp Tidal concerning the deployment of multiple TISEC devices, and concluded that a more detailed EEMP is required to thoroughly understand the proposed methods, data collection, analysis, and how the results will be compared to the baseline data.
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