- The Bay of Fundy has the most extreme tides in the world, and it's just a magical place.

- A visual equivalent would be movement of water up a four-story building.

We can consider the tides to be the heartbeat of the planet's oceans, and it's most notable here when we actually see that rise and fall in extreme ways.

The impact of that is so visible.

This creates a very unique environment.

- If we were able to safely harness our energy resource here, the Bay of Fundy can power about five hundred to eight hundred thousand homes.

- Every day, one hundred and sixty billion tons of water rush in and out of Canada's Bay of Fundy.

Where typical ocean tides average around three feet.

The tides here rise to over fifty.

Its power inspires awe but also begs a question: could we ever harness this natural energy for ourselves?

- There is nothing like the Bay of Fundy and its tides.

It is dangerous, exciting.

It produces incredible ecosystems.

And I think that people have come to respect water bodies like this.

- When you live here, you get in tune with the tides.

Your world revolves around what the tide is doing.

I tell people when they come go out when the water is low and kind of float up with the tide.

Actually, I don't tell people that.

I tell them to be very careful because it's horribly dangerous and you will die if you mess with the tides in the wrong way.

- Tides are largely generated by the gravitational pull of both the moon and the sun on the Earth.

In addition to the effects of the perpetual spinning rotation of the Earth itself.

So why are the tides the highest here?

The Bay of Fundy itself is very large, and it's deep and narrows from its mouth, moving up to the head of the Bay of Fundy.

This creates sort of a natural oscillation, or what's called a seiche.

- Seiching is that sort of natural wave action.

Every body of water has a bit of this natural flow of water, a bit of back and forth, like in a bathtub.

- That natural movement in this particular body of water happens to be in perfect sync with the Atlantic Ocean tides when they flood into the Bay of Fundy.

- You're getting two high tides and two low tides in the twenty-four hour cycle.

So about six and a half hours, you get that change in the tidal cycle.

As the tide goes in and out every day there's always something that comes along that you're just in awe of.

- This environment is incredibly dynamic, and you get to watch this on a daily basis.

How the water transforms the coastal areas.

- So at low tide, depending where you are, you get the mudflats.

some beaches are very rocky.

One of the other neat quirks of our area is that we are a magnet for geology and fossils.

The Bay of Fundy, in a tidal cycle, has more water flowing in and out than all the rivers in the world combined.

It's almost incomprehensible how much water flows through here.

- We get very high flow rates in these channels, so the potential for harvesting tidal energy from the Bay of Fundy is huge, and interests in it have been coming and going like the tide.

But this interest is here to stay now.

- According to modeling done at Acadia University, the Bay of Fundy can power about twenty-five hundred megawatts.

So that would be about five hundred to eight hundred thousand homes.

Now, that is strictly sort of the modeling.

At FORCE, we are in the test and demonstration realm.

We're built for about thirty megawatts.

That would be about twenty thousand homes that we could power.

One of the challenges with harnessing tidal power in the Bay of Fundy is it's very hard work.

The water is very fast.

It's very chaotic.

- So why are we pursuing tidal energy, especially given how challenging it is to work in the environment?

The thing about tidal energy is it's as predictable as the tides themselves, and much more predictable than wind or solar energy.

North America's first tidal energy station was actually built here in Nova Scotia at Annapolis Royal.

But that technology that was available and known at the time was to install a turbine within an existing causeway or dam.

While energy was harnessed and supported the local region with reliable energy, this particular technology doesn't allow for easy passage of fish in the system around the turbine in safe ways, and this is just not acceptable going forward.

- Tidal stream energy is about taking a turbine that you may find in a dam and getting rid of the concrete and just putting that turbine in the water flow and generating electricity.

The draw with FORCE at our particular site is if your device can come here and survive, we're pretty sure it can go anywhere in the world.

So when you do something like that, there's a lot of questions.

How is this going to affect the marine environment?

How is it going to affect things in the greater environment?

- So this platform in particular has three cameras on it.

It's underwater roughly ten hours a day.

It's essentially waiting for fish to passively swim by, just collecting raw camera data to better understand likelihood of any fish encountering a turbine.

- If we know where the fish are, then we can anticipate issues that may come with that and look at overall turbine placement.

- The Bay of Fundy is a highly productive region.

It provides opportunity for lots of animals to live here because of the tidal mixing and the nutrients that come up from the sediments.

But the concerns that the community, fishers, the indigenous people like the Mi'kmaq in the region, have largely relate to what the impacts of tidal energy may have on the marine life, particularly the Atlantic salmon.

Today, we're going to be listening for the signals from the transmitters that have been implanted in some of the Atlantic salmon.

All of these detections are telling the story of what these fish are doing.

We're trying to assess whether or not there's risk to to these fish of the tidal energy industry so that we can have greater confidence in moving forward.

- When we destroy to create, it doesn't work.

So if we can work within the system that's already there, then I think, why not?

We have a developer called Orbital Marine.

They've been working a lot in the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

So we're looking at probably two to three years before we see a device in the Bay of Fundy.

Our stakeholders are not only government and industry, but most importantly our First Nations rights holders.

So it's about reaching out and saying, can we work together?

Can we figure this out?

- I think like mountains, water bodies that have immense energy in them and power just create an environment that is really attractive.

And it affects how people see their environment and how they interact with each other.

- We are beholden to nature.

Our only defense against nature is working with nature.

The bay, if you listen, can teach you an awful lot.

If you don't listen, she's gonna get you.