Is offshore wind Nova Scotia's greatest opportunity since the Age of Sail?

Globe and Mail

19-05-2025

For two years, a twin-engine plane flew in a grid pattern over 1,100 square kilometres of the Atlantic Ocean off Canada's east coast. High-speed cameras captured detailed video, which was used to identify birds, fishing boats, whales and turtles. The imagery's resolution was so fine that it could reveal the birds' species and gender.
This aerial survey was early preparatory work for a proposed wind farm, to be located between 20 and 30 kilometres east of Goldboro, N.S. Water depths range from about 80 to 200 metres – ideal for floating turbines, an emerging technology that could open huge new swaths of ocean for power generation.
The project, dubbed Nova East Wind, would consist of 20 or more turbines with a combined generating capacity of 400 megawatts. It's a joint venture between renewable energy developer DP Energy and SBM Offshore, a Dutch oil and gas services company. If successful, it would be Canada's first offshore wind farm.
Even as U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to terminate offshore wind projects in his country, Nova Scotia's government is leaning hard into the breeze. The province aims to rapidly build five gigawatts of capacity, more than its approximately one million residents require. The surplus power could be used to produce hydrogen in industry and transportation, or be exported to neighbours.
The plan is to have hundreds of turbines spinning within the next decade. Senior government officials have gone so far as to call it the province's greatest opportunity since the Age of Sail. N.S. Energy Minister Trevor Boudreau said in an interview that offshore wind and hydrogen development could add $10-billion to the province's GDP, currently $46-billion.
It is far from certain, however, that offshore wind is Nova Scotia's ticket to recapturing its glories of the 19th century.
Canada has roughly 350 wind farms with a combined capacity of about 18 gigawatts, according to the Canadian Renewable Energy Association. Every single one is on land. Previous attempts to establish farms off B.C. and in the Great Lakes came to nothing. The United States has only four operating offshore projects.
Nova Scotia boasts some of the most enticing winds on the planet. But the early work, including those aerial surveys, hints at monumental challenges ahead. And the province has seen energy crazes before, including more than a decade of experimentation with harnessing the Bay of Fundyʼs awesome tides, which also happen to be world-class.
Sometimes, geography just isn't enough.
Harkening back to the Age of Sail invokes powerful nostalgia in Nova Scotia.
'In 1878, Canada ranked fourth among the ship-owning countries of the world with a flotilla of 7,196 vessels,' Frederick William Wallace wrote in Wooden Ships and Iron Men, a definitive account of eastern Canada's shipbuilding industry published in 1924. 'During the half-century between 1840 and 1890 – the era of the British North American 'wind jammers' – they captured a huge share of the world's carrying trade and built a reputation for smart ships and native-born seamen that was a legend in nautical history.'
But all that is a distant memory, and some of Nova Scotia's ports aren't what they used to be. Offshore projects need ports nearby with enough berths, crane capacity and land for storing materials. An assessment of offshore wind's potential in Nova Scotia, published in January for provincial and federal ministers, concluded that the province's existing ones were inadequate.
Gerald Sheehan, Nova East Wind's project's director, is now searching for ports that could serve as staging areas for the proposed farm, which would be roughly equidistant from Sheet Harbour and the Strait of Canso. The infrastructure deficit is real, he said, but also resolvable.
Another challenge is that Nova Scotia's existing power lines aren't adequate for exporting huge amounts of electricity.
Currently, Nova Scotia Power generates the majority of the province's electricity, mostly by burning coal. Scott Balfour, chief executive of the utility's owner Emera Inc., said offshore wind 'can and will' be part of the province's energy mix.
'We'll need some transmission capacity in order to move that to provinces like New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, and even into New England,' he said.
While Emera lacks the required experience to develop offshore projects, and Nova Scotia Power is gradually withdrawing from power generation to become a 'poles and wires' business, Mr. Balfour added that his company could participate by connecting offshore projects to the grid.
'We've now built the two longest subsea cables in North America. So we know something about building subsea cables.'
Mr. Boudreau said Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are strengthening their interprovincial lines, which will allow his province to trade electrons with Quebec and New England. But with Canada-U.S. relations deteriorating, securing reliable export markets would appear to be a daunting challenge.
Nova Scotia possesses additional experience by virtue of its decades-long dalliance with offshore oil and gas. That wrapped up a few years ago, freeing up talent to refocus on renewable energy. Those skills are highly transferable, said Thomas Timmins, head of the energy law practice at Gowling WLG.
'A lot of the challenges of offshore wind – surprise, surprise – are not that different than the challenges faced by the offshore oil and gas sector,' he said.
The Scotian Shelf – the sprawling segment of the continental shelf surrounding the province – boasts some of the world's strongest winds, according to the joint federal-provincial assessment. Wind speed is naturally critical, because its relationship with electricity generated is exponential. Sea breezes also blow more constantly, allowing offshore turbines to generate power more consistently than their land-based siblings.
The very fact that wind farms are sited in windy areas means they must be able to withstand severe abuse. Studies have suggested that extreme waves off Nova Scotia, with a return period of 50 years, could be far higher than 15 metres.
Sometimes the seabed is too unstable to support foundations. Sea ice, though dwindling amid a warming climate, still presents a threat. Protected marine habitats must be avoided. There's also shipping traffic.
And although low greenhouse gas emissions is a key benefit, offshore wind projects will necessarily have an impact on fish, sea turtles, marine mammals and birds – though to what extent is hotly debated, and clouded by gaps in knowledge.
Turbines could be spaced as distantly as several kilometres apart, but they will still affect fishermen. Long-liners, who fish tuna, halibut and swordfish, would be at risk of snagging their gear on foundations. If farms must be avoided altogether, fishermen could incur significant fuel costs manoeuvring around them. All that raises tricky questions about compensation.
In its final analysis, the federal-provincial assessment committee deemed all of these obstacles to be surmountable – after all, other jurisdictions have navigated them.
Even so, the challenges have tripped up even the most experienced developers.
The first offshore wind farm was commissioned off Denmark in 1991. The World Forum Offshore, a global industry group, said 31 offshore farms began operating last year, increasing total global capacity to 78.5 gigawatts; China, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands dominate.
But offshore projects tend to be more expensive than onshore wind, solar or combined cycle natural gas. That's according to Lazard, an American investment bank that has produced energy cost data for nearly two decades.
Denmark-based Orsted, the world's largest offshore wind developer, has executed projects in Britain, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Taiwan, Korea and Australia. Lately, it has lately been forced to writedown billions of dollars after determining that it could no longer earn profits on various projects.
The company ceased developments off New Jersey in 2023, citing rising costs, slow permitting and supply chain challenges. It warned that costs of electricity generated by offshore wind have been rising, raising the likelihood of further cancellations.
GE Vernova, which was spun off from the former General Electric conglomerate last year, has also felt the pain. Its offshore wind operations, which manufactures turbines and blades, have been unprofitable, and it has been dogged by embarrassing blade failures, leading to costly delays.
Mr. Balfour acknowledged offshore wind farms cost more than alternatives. 'But if you're getting more energy, more consistently, that helps to make the cost per megawatt hour and the cost of the system more moderate. That's the exciting part of this.'
The government's own enthusiasm has fuelled the comparisons to the Age of Sail. But it's worth recalling just how distant Nova Scotia's golden age of shipbuilding has become. By the time Mr. Wallace waxed poetically about it in his now century-old book, the sailors and shipbuilders who made it all happen had already 'vanished utterly into the mists of oblivion.'
Elsewhere in North America, offshore wind seems to have ignominiously retreated into those same mists, without the faintest trace of glory.
The Biden administration had hoped to deploy more than 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030. More than 37 gigawatts of offshore capacity were planned to start up by 2032, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, an industry research and data provider. But Mr. Trump is determined to end all that.
He issued an executive order on his first day of office barring issuance of leases for offshore wind projects anywhere on the U.S.'s continental shelf. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum even halted a 54-turbine project, Empire Wind 1, that was already under construction.
It's a reminder that offshore wind projects take many years to complete, leaving them vulnerable to shifting political breezes.
Mr. Timmins said he was optimistic that with sustained federal-provincial co-operation, Nova Scotia can realize its plans.
'If Canada and Nova Scotia turn their minds to this and want to make this happen, it can happen.'