Abstract
As the marine renewable energy (MRE) industry progresses around the world, understanding of the potential environmental effects of MRE has improved. Opportunities to investigate the environmental effects of operational MRE devices have increased in recent years with more projects in the water. Despite these advancements, some areas of uncertainty persist. Key concerns remain about how MRE devices and arrays interact with surrounding environments, and how marine animals behave around them. These uncertainties continue to pose challenges during permitting processes for MRE. Additionally, the development of larger-scale MRE devices and arrays presents new questions and uncertainty for MRE permitting processes, particularly in understanding how potential environmental effects of MRE scale up and interact with other ocean activities.
To better understand how regulators perceive and manage environmental risks during permitting processes for MRE projects, a survey was conducted across several OES-Environmental member countries beginning in 2025. Building on a previous regulator survey conducted by OES-Environmental for multiple countries from 2017-2021, this survey included updated questions to reflect changing information needs regarding the environmental effects of MRE. Its purpose was to understand regulators’ familiarity with MRE technologies, perceptions of environmental risks associated with MRE technologies across varying scales, and what they view as best approaches to MRE development, including permitting and the applicability of data transferability. The survey also included some questions to gather Tethys user data. A list of questions and answer options is provided in Appendix A.
This report summarizes the results from the survey of regulators in Canada. Results are compared to the previous survey for Canada, conducted and published in 2020.