Bay of Fundy, bay of dreams: The tantalizing, frustrating quest to harness the world's most powerful tides
What Jason Hayman remembers most is feeling “numb.” He had met with his board and lawyers multiple times, and on a spring morning in 2023 he was off to meet Virginia Forsyth, a notary public in Cowes, United Kingdom, and someone he had known for years.
Forsyth’s office in Trent House, Isle of Wight, a stately stone residence with a stately stone wall out front, was just a few blocks from the local marina where Hayman moored his sailboat. He walked to the meeting since he wasn’t in a hurry. He wasn’t, mentally, entirely present at all, knowing the appointment was but a formality and that its purpose involved signing what amounted to a death certificate for his tidal power technology company, Sustainable Marine Energy Ltd. (SME).
SME had been attempting to successfully do what many others had previously failed to do: harness the Bay of Fundy’s tides on Canada’s East Coast as an energy source.
“It was a rough day,” he recalled. “We had bet the farm on Canada, and I was walking in to see someone I had known for quite a while and saying, ‘I need you to notarize some papers, because I am hanging up my spurs.’”
The now-former CEO of the now-bankrupt SME was not the first entrepreneur to have a rough day related to the Bay of Fundy. Every effort to tap the world’s highest tides has met an unhappy end, the causes for which have been many. Some tidal power players simply lacked legitimacy at the outset. Many more ran out of money as the bills piled up and investors’ patience dried up, but the string of defeats has not killed the dream since plans are already in the works for another company to give it a try.
“The beauty of it is, you can’t take the Bay of Fundy and move it somewhere else; the resource is never going to go away,”
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