Our free course on tidal and wave power: how the ocean carries energy, the Bay of Fundy story, Pacific wave projects and ocean energy's future role.
Canada has the longest coastline in the world, and some of the most energetic water on the planet. Twice a day, the Bay of Fundy fills and drains with tides that can rise higher than a four-storey building, while storms in the North Pacific send powerful swells rolling toward British Columbia. For more than a century, people have wondered how to turn that motion into electricity.
This course explains ocean energy in plain language. You'll learn how tides and waves carry energy, how the main technologies work, and what has actually happened in Canada, from the Annapolis Royal tidal station to today's turbine projects at the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE) and an Indigenous-led wave project at Yuquot on Nootka Island, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. You'll also look honestly at the effects on fish and whales, the high costs of working in the sea, and where ocean energy fits next to offshore wind.
Sundamentals is an independent non-profit. We don't build turbines, sell equipment or take money from developers. Ocean energy is an exciting but still-early industry, so throughout this course we separate what is proven from what is promising, and we use ranges rather than precise figures wherever numbers are uncertain.
The course is free, self-paced and takes about 45 minutes. It has three modules with short knowledge checks and a 10-question final exam. Score 80% or higher on the final exam to download your PDF certificate of completion.
Tides are caused mainly by the Moon's gravity, with a smaller pull from the Sun. As the Earth turns, most coastlines pass through two bulges of water each day, which is why many places, including the Bay of Fundy, see two high tides and two low tides roughly every 24 hours and 50 minutes. When the Sun and Moon line up, around new and full moons, the tides are bigger; these are called spring tides. When they pull at right angles, the smaller tides are called neap tides.
In the open ocean, the tidal rise is usually modest. Near the coast, the shape of the seabed and shoreline can amplify it dramatically. The Bay of Fundy is a famous example. Its length and depth give it a natural sloshing rhythm that is close to the rhythm of the tides, a bit like pushing a child on a swing at just the right moment. The result is the highest tides in the world, with a range of up to about 16 metres in the Minas Basin at the head of the bay.
Tidal energy can be captured in two ways. You can trap water at high tide and release it through turbines, using the difference in height, or you can place turbines directly in the fast currents that tides create as water rushes in and out of narrow channels.
The biggest advantage of tidal energy is predictability. Because tides follow the motions of the Moon and Sun, we can forecast them years or even decades ahead. That sets tidal power apart from wind and solar, which depend on the weather. The catch is that tidal output still rises and falls through each cycle, with brief slack periods when the water turns around.
Waves are a form of stored wind energy. When wind blows across the ocean surface, it pushes the water into ripples, then into larger waves. The stronger the wind, the longer it blows and the greater the stretch of open water it crosses, the bigger the waves become. Once formed, swells can travel thousands of kilometres across an ocean while losing relatively little energy.
The energy in a wave grows quickly with its size. Roughly speaking, a wave twice as high carries about four times as much energy, and longer-period swells carry more energy than short, choppy waves. That is why exposed coastlines facing large oceans, especially west-facing coasts in the mid-latitudes, tend to have the strongest wave resources.
Canada's Pacific coast, particularly the outer coast of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, faces the full sweep of the North Pacific and has one of the better wave resources in the world. Parts of Atlantic Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador also see energetic waves. Wave energy tends to be strongest in fall and winter, when storms are more frequent, which matches the season when Canadians use the most electricity.
Waves are less predictable than tides but more predictable than wind at a single moment. Forecasters can see large swells coming days in advance as they travel across the ocean. The challenge is that waves arrive from different directions with constantly changing heights, and the same ocean that delivers useful energy on a calm day can deliver destructive force during a storm.
A tidal barrage is a dam or causeway built across a bay or river mouth. Gates let the tide flow in, then close to hold the water back. When the tide drops outside, the trapped water is released through turbines, much like a low-head hydro dam. France's La Rance station has operated this way since 1966, and South Korea's Sihwa Lake plant, which opened in 2011, is currently the largest in the world. Barrages can produce a lot of power, but they change the whole estuary behind them, so few new ones are being built.
In-stream tidal turbines work more like underwater wind turbines. They sit on the seabed or hang beneath floating platforms in channels where tidal currents are fast. Because water is roughly 800 times denser than air, a relatively small rotor can capture a lot of energy. Speed matters even more: the power in a current rises with the cube of its speed, so doubling the speed gives about eight times the power. That is why developers seek out narrow, fast-flowing passages.
Wave energy converters come in many shapes, and engineers have not yet settled on one winning design. Point absorbers are buoys that bob up and down. Oscillating water columns use rising and falling water to push air through a turbine. Other devices flex, pitch or surge with the waves, sit on the seabed or are built into breakwaters.
Every design has to survive salt water, storms, marine growth and constant motion for decades, while being affordable to install and maintain. Meeting all of those demands at once is the central challenge of ocean energy.
Canada was an early mover in tidal power. In 1984, Nova Scotia Power opened the Annapolis Royal Generating Station on a causeway across the Annapolis River, near where it meets the Bay of Fundy. It was a barrage-style plant with a single large turbine rated at about 20 megawatts, and it was the first tidal power plant in North America. For about 35 years, it generated electricity on the falling tide, roughly twice a day.
The station proved that tidal power could feed a Canadian grid reliably for decades. It also showed the downsides of the barrage approach. Fish moving through the river could pass through the turbine, and federal science advice later found that this caused significant fish deaths. The causeway also changed how water and sediment moved in the river, affecting the shoreline and wetlands upstream.
In 2019, a key component failed and the plant stopped generating. Given the cost of repairs and growing concern about fish, it was not returned to service, and the station has since been permanently closed. Today, the site is a reminder of both the promise and the trade-offs of tidal energy.
Those lessons shaped what came next. Rather than building large dams across Fundy, a much bigger idea that was studied in past decades and rejected partly because of its environmental and coastal impacts, attention shifted to in-stream turbines that sit in the current and let water, sediment and marine life flow around them. Today, regulators expect any new tidal project to show how fish and other marine life can pass safely before it is approved.
The Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy, known as FORCE, was established in 2009 at Black Rock, near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. It sits beside the Minas Passage, a narrow channel where the tide funnels in and out of the Minas Basin. Currents there can reach about five metres per second, among the fastest tidal flows anywhere. FORCE provides developers with seabed berths, subsea cables to shore and a grid connection, plus a visitor centre and an environmental monitoring program.
The early years were tough. In 2016, a two-megawatt turbine became the first in-stream tidal device to deliver power to the grid from the Minas Passage, but its developer later collapsed and a turbine was left on the seabed for years. Another developer received approval for a trial in 2023 but cancelled its plans, citing regulatory uncertainty, and its parent company soon failed. These setbacks showed how hard the Fundy current is on equipment, budgets and permitting.
Momentum returned in late 2025. In November 2025, Fisheries and Oceans Canada issued a Fisheries Act authorization allowing Eauclaire Tidal to install up to three floating turbines built by Scotland's Orbital Marine Power at FORCE, about 7.5 megawatts in total. It was the first project approved under a staged federal approach that lets projects grow step by step as monitoring results come in. That same month, Nova Scotia selected Eauclaire and Orbital for new tidal licences with long-term power contracts that would add several more turbines.
In August 2026, the province also opened a new window for small demonstration permits elsewhere in its Fundy priority area, outside the FORCE site, with applications due at the end of October 2026. As of late 2026, these projects are moving toward installation, but deployment dates depend on financing, construction and approvals.
On the other side of the country, wave energy is being developed with a very different goal: powering a remote community. Yuquot, also known as Friendly Cove, sits on Nootka Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It is the ancestral home of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation. The site is reachable only by boat or floatplane and is not connected to BC's electricity grid, so power has come from fossil-fuel generators.
The Nation has long planned to return to living at Yuquot, and clean, local energy is part of that vision. Working with the University of Victoria's Pacific Regional Institute for Marine Energy Discovery (PRIMED), the community studied the wave, wind and solar resources around the village. A federally funded front-end engineering and design study looked at a wave energy plant of about 200 kilowatts to replace most diesel use.
As reported in August 2026, construction was set to begin that month on a hybrid system combining a floating wave energy device offshore with solar panels and battery storage on land, keeping a small amount of diesel as backup. Construction is expected to continue through 2027, with power generation planned after that. If it proceeds as planned, it would be among the first wave energy demonstrations in Canada.
Yuquot shows where ocean energy may make sense first. In remote coastal communities, diesel is expensive, polluting and noisy, so a local renewable source can compete much sooner than it could on a large provincial grid. Projects led by the communities themselves also keep decisions, jobs and benefits close to home.
The places with the strongest tides and waves are often rich in marine life. The Bay of Fundy supports fisheries, migrating fish such as striped bass, sturgeon and endangered inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon, and marine mammals including harbour porpoises and whales. Any ocean energy project has to show it can operate without causing serious harm.
Researchers focus on several possible effects. Fish and mammals could collide with moving blades. Turbines and vessels add underwater noise. Subsea cables create weak electromagnetic fields that some species can sense. Anchors and foundations disturb the seabed, and large arrays could, in theory, change currents and sediment movement. For barrages, the biggest concern is blocking or harming fish moving through an estuary, as Annapolis Royal showed.
Monitoring in a place like the Minas Passage is extremely difficult. The water is fast, murky and full of sediment, so cameras see little. Scientists rely on hydrophones that listen for porpoise clicks, sonar and echosounders that track fish, and tagged fish whose movements are recorded by underwater receivers. FORCE and its partners have spent years developing and testing these tools.
Canada now uses a staged, adaptive approach. Projects start small, gather data and report it to regulators. If monitoring shows effects are within acceptable limits, more turbines can be added; if not, operations can be changed or stopped. This is meant to let the industry learn safely, but it also means developers face uncertainty about how far and how fast they can grow. Results from FORCE are shared publicly, so coastal residents and fishers can see what monitoring has found.
Ocean energy is still expensive. Today, electricity from tidal and wave projects generally costs several times more than electricity from onshore wind or utility-scale solar. Much of that gap comes from being early: projects are small, designs vary and every installation is close to a one-off, so the cost savings that come from building thousands of identical units have not yet arrived.
The ocean is also a punishing place to work. Salt water corrodes metal, marine growth fouls surfaces and storms can damage equipment. In the Minas Passage, the current is so strong that divers and vessels can work only during short slack-water windows around the turn of the tide. Specialized ships, subsea cables and grid connections all add cost, and repairs can mean towing equipment back to port.
Financing is another hurdle. Investors see technical, environmental and regulatory risks, and the history of failed companies in the sector makes them cautious. Long-term power contracts, government support, shared test sites like FORCE and clearer permitting rules all help reduce that risk.
There are reasons for optimism. Floating designs that can be towed to shore for maintenance, like the turbines planned for FORCE, avoid some of the hardest offshore work. Lessons from offshore wind and oil and gas are transferable, and Atlantic Canada has deep marine expertise. Supporters expect costs to fall as projects grow, as happened with wind and solar, but how quickly that will happen is still uncertain. Until then, the strongest early markets are likely to be places where the alternatives, such as imported diesel, are themselves expensive.
Canada's electricity demand is expected to grow as more homes, vehicles and industries switch from fossil fuels to electricity. Most new clean supply will likely come from wind, solar, hydro and storage, which are cheaper today. Ocean energy is not expected to replace them, but it could play a valuable supporting role.
Tidal power's greatest strength is predictability. A grid operator can know years ahead exactly when tidal turbines will produce, which makes them easier to plan around than weather-dependent sources. Tidal output also follows a different rhythm from wind and solar, so a mix of all three can be smoother than any one alone. Wave energy tends to peak in winter, when demand is highest.
Offshore wind is ocean energy's larger cousin. In July 2025, the federal and Nova Scotia governments designated four wind energy areas off Nova Scotia, and in June 2026 the offshore regulator named the first group of pre-qualified bidders for seabed licences. Nova Scotia has spoken of offshore wind on a scale of gigawatts. Ports, vessels, subsea cables, skilled workers and marine research built for one ocean industry can serve the others, so offshore wind could help lower costs for tidal and wave projects too.
Industry groups have set ambitious goals, including a vision of more than one gigawatt of tidal capacity in Canada by 2050, though reaching it will depend on costs, monitoring results and policy. In the near term, the most likely places for ocean energy to grow are test sites like FORCE and remote coastal communities like Yuquot. For coastal Canadians, the best way to stay involved is to follow local consultations, ask questions about environmental monitoring and benefits, and keep learning.
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