Blades break off underwater turbine prototype - Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca: "Nova Scotia Power has suffered another setback in its $8.5-million experiment to try and generate electricity from the powerful Bay of Fundy tides.
Two large blades have broken off an underwater turbine, forcing the power company and its Irish partner, OpenHydro, to pull the 400-tonne prototype up from the bottom of the ocean floor a year early, Mark Savoury, a Nova Scotia Power vice-president, said Friday.
'The images are indicating we have a loss of two blades,' Peter Corcoran, OpenHydro’s chief financial officer, told reporters at a news conference Friday in Halifax. 'The Bay of Fundy is one of the world’s best tidal sites and I guess the world’s best tidal sites don’t come easy.'
The companies can’t explain how the reinforced plastic rotors were damaged and want to pull the turbine out of the water later this summer or early fall so engineers can closely examine it.
The damaged turbine was discovered recently when a video camera was lowered 15 metres into the murky waters of the Bay of Fundy to film the turbine.
The video was taken back to Dublin for analysis by OpenHydro engineers, who quickly found images of the missing rotors. The company would not release footage to the media.
'I think at this stage, trying to determine timing and determine cause is incredibly difficult to do. Only until we have extracted the turbine will our engineers be able to really get inside that system,' said Corcoran."
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