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The community may welcome and update on developments in my world of offshore wind and hydrogen in Canada.
Visiting the country and embarking on a West to East tour and delivering training in Calgary pre-lockdown; I've tracked the situation there noted how many of the investors especially in Toronto, get the green agenda and are quite happy to find suitable opportunities in which to invest.
Recent news is when I was there, they were most of the focus was on the Bay of Fundy. It seems to have been around forever in a tidal resource aspect and also off the coast of Vancouver and nascent signs of offshore wind and hydrogen rapidly emerging.
Since then, the direction of travel is is gravitated more to the east coast the Nova Scotia we've had a number of chats with key stakeholders. And finally, things seem to be emerging a number of reasons for this, including the geopolitical with recent discussions between the Prime Minister Trudeau and the German leader, Olaf Schultz, and also the war in the Ukraine as as focus people's minds.
With this in mind, it was interesting to read how were the Bay of Fundy linking up to the United States main offshore wind rounds which have already shared with us and right down indeed down the eastern seaboard to the Gulf of Mexico where bomb as I've also shared with the community is is looking at massive scale offshore wind and indeed hygiene schemes. on the Canadian side, a number of factors are coming together.
Canada vast spaces and resource and when I was there, I was looking at with developers working on things such as data centres, which will be powered from renewable sources in northern Alberta with wind and solar combining effectively there.
Initial indications as depicted in the image at the top are of a substantial 2000 GW plus fixed offshore potential but a remarkable 7,200 GW floating wind capability. Given the advancement in the field and the announcement US Floating Wind shot from their southern neighbour that represents a remarkable prize.
The largest operational electrolyser in the world operates at a hydro facility in Quebec and a number of prominent sectoral companies are Canadian.
Hydrogen has gained traction since those times and now it offers something of a missing link filling in the variability gaps of renewable energy and its versatility proving so useful in linking the various sectors such as transport, where German Rail advanced advances indicates that there might be something happening on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a vast undertaking 1000s of miles along where locomotives are being trialled. We can see from the wind map shown that Canada’s excellent wind resource but comes with challenges as was already discovered with the Vancouver offshore wind farm, which has gone much slower than originally anticipated, perhaps by the combination of hydrogen might make the business case more attractive and see life breeze into the West Coast situation.
