Can Innovasea’s HydroAware Project Help Spark the Next Wave of Hydropower in Canada?

Canada is well known as a global leader in hydropower, trailing only China and Brazil in the amount of hydroelectricity it generates each year. It’s a clean energy success story, with six out of every 10 homes or businesses powered by hydroelectricity.

But rather than rest on its laurels, Canada needs to double down on hydropower if it has any hope of meeting its ambitious goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

According to Waterpower Canada, achieving that net-zero goal will only be possible if the country produces two to three times as much clean power as it does today. And while solar and wind power get a lot of the headlines, hydropower is the clean energy workhorse that is going to get the country across the finish line – or not.

Innovasea is positioned to play a key role in the expansion of hydropower in the coming decades, in Canada and beyond. The reason? Our emerging tagless detection technology provides unprecedented insights into fish activity around hydro facilities, better protecting wildlife while at the same time giving operators the data they need to placate regulators, extend operating hours and generate more power.

Building on the success of our tagless technology, we recently launched the HydroAware project, a new $10.5 million R&D initiative under the auspices of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster that aims to improve aquatic animal research in dynamic water environments – the types of locations ideal for hydropower and tidal power.

“This is an important project that aims to provide hydro and tidal power operators with new tools to monitor fish in harsh environments and help them in their regulatory process so they can generate clean energy for our planet.” says Jean Quirion, vice president of research and development.

HydroAware

HydroAware is focused on expanding the use of artificial intelligence in fish tracking, in both Innovasea’s longtime acoustic telemetry technology and its emerging tagless detection solution.

The project has three primary goals:

• Improve performance in harsh environments – Train AI models to do a better job of finding fish in high energy environments that have a lot of acoustic or visual noise.
• Enable deployments in remote locations – Develop technology that will enable our tagless detection system to work in far-flung areas and automate data retrieval from underwater receivers.
• Deliver faster insights – Use AI to speed up data processing on the back end so researchers, regulators and others get quicker results.

HydroAware follows an earlier Innovasea-led Ocean Supercluster project, OceanAware, that was instrumental in creating the aforementioned tagless fish detection technology. Joining the HydroAware project are Nova Scotia Power, New Brunswick Power, FORCE and Big Moon.

“It’s like a sequel, if you will, of Ocean Aware,” says Quirion. “But with a focus on helping hydro and tidal power generators get better evidence about the safe passage of fish around their infrastructure.”

Hydropower Demands

Of all the various forms of renewable energy, hydropower provides the most reliable and predictable electricity to the grid. It accounts for 62 percent of all the electricity generated in Canada today.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that all that electricity only fulfills about 20 percent of the country’s overall energy needs.

Electrification efforts aim to alter that, moving technologies and processes in areas like transportation, heating and cooling, and manufacturing away from fossil fuels and over to electricity, which is more efficient and emits less carbon.

More good news: Though it’s already a global leader in hydropower, Canada has abundant water resources and can easily double its hydro generating capacity. The challenge lies in getting new projects designed, approved and built.

New dam projects are always controversial because of their potential impact on wildlife and the environment. The permitting process is often contentious and can drag on and on.

Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body says that needs to change and is calling for the government to expedite the regulatory process for any projects that work toward emissions targets.

“Transforming Canadian energy systems will require unprecedented investment in and construction of clean energy infrastructure,” the group said in its 2023 report. “To ensure Canada develops and stays on the path to net-zero, projects will need to advance through the regulatory system in a timely manner.”

HydroAware could play a key role, unleashing the power of artificial intelligence to speed up and improve aquatic animal research.

Ultimately that would provide regulators with exponentially more raw data and more accurate and thorough research than they’ve ever had before.

A Growing Tidal Wave?

As Canada looks to build more hydropower facilities, harnessing tidal power could help it alleviate some of the pressure on the existing hydro industry.

Tidal power generation involves capturing kinetic energy from the rise and fall of oceanic tides and then converting it into electricity. It requires strong currents or a large tidal range, but is more predictable than wind and solar power and, unlike solar, can generate electricity around the clock.

Canada’s Bay of Fundy has as tidal range of 52 feet, the largest in the world, making it ideal for tidal power generation. Proponents believe its Minas Passage could one day produce 7,000 megawatts of energy, enough to power all two million homes in Atlantic Canada.

But monitoring fish activity in that type of environment is challenging, and that could jeopardize the ability of any tidal power project to conduct proper environmental reviews and obtain permits.

“We’re trying to use AI to make our technology perform better in harsh environments where there’s a lot of noise,” says Quirion. “The tidal power folks especially operate in a super harsh environment – high tides with lots of noise. So what we’re exploring now are changes to the [AI] model architecture that will make it easier to still detect the fish if there’s a lot of white water or bubbles in the water.”

Faster Insights

The tagless detection technology Innovasea developed under Ocean Aware provides 24/7 data on fish activity around fish ladders and other dam infrastructure – exponentially more data than humans can produce manually counting fish on video for a few hours each week. It’s proven highly effective in multiple field tests and can deliver data and information on fish behavior to hydro operators in real time, assisting them with day-to-day operations.

HydroAware aims to take that a step further, using AI to capture better data up front in dynamic environments and then speeding up the raw data processing on the back end – a process that includes retrieving equipment, downloading data, processing the data and then teasing out conclusions.

“I see it as speeding up the time to getting insights,” says Quirion. “Whereas right now, when you have all your data, you’re still looking at several weeks if not several months of data processing and analysis before you get those insights. We’re hoping to develop AI tools where we might be talking about just a few hours for that and then you’d have something you can consume and start to draw conclusions from.

“The end result is that you would be able to process hundreds of studies in the time that previously you might have been able to process one or two.”

That would be enormously valuable to regulators or anyone else concerned about protecting wildlife around hydro facilities.

HydroAware, which runs through March of 2026, is underway and will ramp up later this year when we begin working with our partners to collect data at some of these high energy, noisy environments. That data will be used to train the AI models.

“Luckily we’ve partnered with people who are operating in these kind of harsh environments,” says Quirion. “That’s the value of the partnerships we have where we’re able to go out and get the kinds of data sets we need. Usually it’s hard to do that. But that’s sort of the whole philosophy of the Ocean Supercluster where you’re stronger because of your partnership.”