High costs for environmental monitoring helped put a stop to OpenHydro’s tidal project off the coast of Washington state earlier this year.A tidal power demonstration project licensed in 2014 for Admiralty Inlet, the northern area of the Puget Sound’s main basin, was rejected by Washington state’s Snohomish County Public Utility District (PUD) early in 2016.It would have been the U.S. west coast’s first tidal energy project, but the utility opted to stop the project after environmental monitoring, more extensive than that planned in Nova Scotia, escalated costs.The project was supposed to test two 441-tonne six-metre-diameter rotary turbines built by the Irish developer.The turbines set to go into the Minas Passage this fall are over twice the size of those that have been proposed in Washington.The second-largest public utility in the Pacific Northwest and 12th largest in the U.S., Snohomish County PUD had invested about $3.5 million in the demonstration project with the U.S. federal government contributing at least $12 million dollars.Conservancy groups and Native American tribes with fishing rights in the area opposed the project because of concerns about the turbines affecting endangered species and critical habitat.“We’ve said from the beginning there clearly wasn’t enough information about the effects that these experimental turbines would have on wildlife,” Orca Conservancy president Shari Tarantino told the Chronicle Herald in a phone interview.She said she sees lots of similarities between the West Coast project and what is being proposed for the FORCE site in the Minas Passage.“When we first raised concerns about this one, we were sort-of going against the current.”Tarantino said that green energy projects often go unchallenged by environmentalists.“Especially ones under water because no one can really see it.”“We support finding alternatives to fossil fuel and we are not opposed to tidal energy in the right location, but clearly this was not it.”“We told them to send the engineers back to the drawing board and come back when they have a better plan.”Nova Scotia Environment said its assessment of the Minas Passage project determined there is a very low risk to marine life.“It’s our job to ensure risks are mitigated and that is what is being done via the monitoring plan.”Tarantino added the Washington project’s environmental monitoring included the ability to stop the turbine manually to avoid injuries to marine life, which is not part of the plan approved by the Nova Scotia government.She said the smaller turbines not only posed a threat to any creature coming into contact with them, they are also dangerously loud as they are deployed and as blades turn.Tarantino said the utility had planned to place the turbines in an area frequented by orcas (killer whales) and 12 other federally-protected species.“The costs of construction and environmental monitoring for the project to satisfy our concerns ended up being nearly double the initial estimates, so (the project) wasn’t worth their while.”The turbines on the West Coast were expected to be deployed for three to five years, while those in the Minas Passage are licensed to be on the seafloor off the coast of Parrsboro for 15 years.The technology FORCE is using to monitor effects in the Minas Passage is called the Fundy Advanced Sensor Technology (FAST), which encompasses three separate underwater platforms, onshore radar, meteorological instruments, and a tide gauge.“Many ocean sensors have not been designed to operate in extreme high flows like those at the FORCE site in the Minas Passage,” said Andrew Lowery, who oversees the system.“The platforms are designed to help us advance our ability to capture data in these challenging, complex conditions.”